Showcasing amazing games! 🎮

The Pytch team were delighted to welcome 23 first year students and five teachers from O’Connell Secondary School to showcase their fantastic work in Pytch.

Getting started with Pytch

During November, our development lead Ben North ran a four week Pytch course in O’Connell Secondary School. All of the students were completely new to Pytch and only a few had used Scratch before. The first week of the course focused on Scratch basics, helping everyone get comfortable with core coding concepts before moving into Pytch. Despite being new to both tools, the group showed real skill and enthusiasm from the very start.

Celebrating student creativity ✨

At the showcase, Ben gave a really accessible introduction to academic research and how projects like Pytch help us understand the best ways to support young people in learning to code. He then shared a selection of seven student projects and talked through the ideas and design decisions behind them.

The creativity on display was brilliant. From boxing games to cartoon adventures and football stadium challenges, the imagination and effort put in by the students really shone through. One project even featured a scoring system that reached infinity!! This got a huge reaction in the room.

“It is powerful for young learners to realise that you can change things with computers.”
– Ben North, Pytch Development Lead

The students were fully engaged throughout, eager to see how their games could become more challenging or more fun. Many said they would have loved the course to run for longer which is a wonderful reflection of their experience and the support from their teachers.

A heartfelt thank you! 💙👏

It was such a pleasure to meet the wonderful students and teachers from O’Connell Secondary School. Thank you to all the students for your hard work and enthusiasm over the past month. We loved seeing your fantastic games in action and the brilliant ideas behind them.

We also want to thank your amazing teachers, Sean Patterson, Conor Flood, Colm and Sandra for supporting and encouraging the students throughout.

A special thanks to Mickey McHugh and Joy Creighton from City Connects for introducing Pytch to O’Connell Secondary School and Derek Hobbs, Year Head at O’Connell School, for helping make this workshop possible.

We look forward to seeing the O’Connell Secondary School students progress to infinity and beyond. 🚀