Kirsten (2nd from left) with her team members at Bridge to College: Introduction to Computer Science and Programming at Third Level in TCD
Last week, Rachel Healy and I were invited to attend a ‘Bridge to College: Introduction to Computer Science and Programming at Third Level’ course, at Oriel House in Trinity College, Dublin.
We were to study the basics of computer programming and engineering, mentored by past students of Trinity College, and with supervision from the Head of the School of Computer Science, TCD. It was attended by 25 students from around Ireland, some traveling as far as from Laois and Cork to attend.
Once the students had been divided into different teams (trying to separate us from each other), we began work on a simple Scratch animation. We were to brainstorm, and create, an animation in an hour – no mean feat!
On day two, we constructed robotic “rover-bots” from Lego. Upon completion, we programmed the cars to travel safely around a home-made track. That same day, we were told that we were to create our own video games. And so, we were to brainstorm, design and create our own computer game – we chose a ‘Harry Potter Shoot ‘em up’. The game had to include images of each member of the team, and had to be a fully functioning game. It took us four hours and we were very proud of what we accomplished! Our introduction – the part that myself and another girl had specialized in – was praised as the best student work ever seen in the years of running the course!
Day three saw us start work on engineering. We were set the challenge of engineering our own interactive whiteboard. After all complaining about how impossible this task was, we discovered that in fact, we could not only build the pen in half an hour, but could also use an old toothbrush to make it!
During the course of the week, we were visited by various TCD faculty members, all of whom had very valuable advice for us, regarding Computer Science and Engineering at third level.
All in all, it was a fantastic week – we made new friends, built an interactive whiteboard, designed a video game and learnt a lot about the future and computer science. The TCD ‘Bridge to College: Introduction to Computer Science and Programming’ is most definitely an experience I would recommend.
Kirsten Levermore
You can see our game at: http://scratch.mit.edu/users/TeamUncertainTeam
