Computer Science student Emma Murphy recently led an AI Grand Prix workshop which took place in collaboration with Trinity Access programmes.
The workshop welcomed 22 transition year students from a variety of schools across Dublin including Drimnagh Castle Secondary School, St Joseph’s Secondary School Rush, and Tallaght Community School.
All students had a limited amount of prior programming experience. The aim of the workshop was to introduce them to programming fundamentals in the exciting context of self-driving race cars. Over three intense hours, teams collaborated to brainstorm, code, and test their autonomous race car solutions in Python. The thrill of debugging and seeing their cars in action made the experience especially rewarding for both students and mentors.
The highlight of the day was the Grand Prix competition where the teams competed against each other to be crowned Grand Prix winners. The winning team consisted of 3 students who had never even tried programming before, a testament to the guidance and support from the four Formula Trinity mentors (Emma Murphy, Dhruv Ranajit Choudhury, Aadya Vig, Ronan Hannon).
Overall, this event was a particularly valuable opportunity for students from disadvantaged areas, offering them practical experience in engineering they might not otherwise have access to.
Following the success of this first workshop, they are looking forward to running Grand Prix events such as this in the future. There is absolutely no shortage of interest. The TAP coordinator already has another 20 students eager to participate in the next workshop.
To sustain the success of these workshops, the student team behind the AI Grand Prix Workshop is currently seeking support to secure additional laptops in order to run further sessions. Enquiries relating to the student-led AI Grand Prix Workshop initiative, including support for future workshops, can be directed to here.