Andrea Magnorsky, of BatCat games, was pretty happy with the turn out for Gamecraft in DIT Kevin Street last Sat, the 25th of February. A few weeks of frantic twittering and facebooking and the event had registered over 200 interested attendees.
On the day about 120 turned up with computers in tow to face the challenge of programming ‘dinosaur angst’ in one day. Some arrived in teams, some arrived with half their equipment but by the time I arrived at midday there was a hum of machines and tap taping on keyboards, runs for coffee and serious computer screen staring.
The event started with coffee and muffins and then the theme was announced. Not everyone could fit in the main room so they were spread out over three rooms with another room for lunch. DIT Kevin street were happy to accommodate the event and indeed Bryan Duggan of the Computer Science department was busy coding when I arrived. Sponsorship for refreshments and prizes was provided by Open Emotion, Demonware, Microsoft and Swerve.
I spotted some familiar faces of local indies like BitSmith, groups of students from different colleges and kids like Sean Reidy and Niall Fitzpatrick, aged 10 and 14 respectively who were having problems with Java and were going to switch to Python! Sean told me his uncle worked in a games company on the west coast of the States and he hoped he would be able to work experience over there in transition year…in a few years time. Representatives of Coder DoJo where there too.
Watch out for links to the work done on utube and for some more events like this in the near future.
For my pics of the event see http://bit.ly/wsO2y3
For interview in Irish Times last Friday with Andrea see http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/theticket/2012/0224/1224312275501.html