Cloughfin National School, has received an award for an education technology project at the Dragons’ Den competition as part of the Excited Digital Learning Festival in Dublin Castle at the weekend.
The competition saw four schools from Limerick, Meath, Donegal and Dublin create and pitch a business idea for a new innovation, using technology in the classroom, to a panel of Dragon judges.
The Donegal school pitched GoGrip, which is a pencil grip to help teach students how to hold a pencil. The grip which can slide over a regular pencil matches the exact contour for the correct holding of a pencil with special in-built dents. It also has sensors that connect to a mobile device to ensure students are holding it correctly.
GoGrip replaces the large amount of teachers’ time that is spent going to individual pupils by automatically testing they are holding it the right way. GoGrip will also have an inbuilt GPS tracker to stop pencils being lost.
The device will be used by 4-7 year olds and they are targeting schools and parents. The team also expect to make €7,000 in their first year.
In preparation for the challenge each school received a day of training delivered by the Learnovate Centre and had a mentor assigned to help them expand their ideas. The schools held their own competition to select the best idea from their group of students. Each school team also spent a couple of hours refining their idea with mentors and preparing their presentation for the Dragons.
The judges were Alan Maguire, Versari, Theresa Hagan, HMH, Stephen Howell, Microsoft and Dean Magee, Google
Over 150 school students from around the country also took part in a series of workshops organised by the Science Gallery where they made their own human pianos, build and raced their own race cars and made maps of Dublin using recycled and repurposed goods. Students workshop were also delivered showing how ‘Little Bits’, which is a system of electronic modules that snap together with magnets, could change the teaching of physics and electronics.
Saturday of the festival will see over 350 people gather for a series of talks and discussions from how local schools are using technology to communicate with other students globally, how gamification in the classroom can dramatically change learning and student engagement, the possibilities of educational technology and collaboration and finishing up with a prestation by Mona Akmal on Coding and Creativity.
Students from around the country will also showcase their technology projects.
The Excited Digital Learning Festival is an independent and not for profit initiative. The Excited Digital Learning Festival is supported by Science Foundation Ireland through the 2014 SFI Discover Programme Funding Call, the Department of Education & Skills, the Department of Communications Energy and Natural Resources and SAP.