Symantec and CoderDojo Coolest Projects

Members News - Jul 27, 2017

Symantec were delighted to be part of this year’s CoderDojo Coolest Projects event in Dublin in June. CoderDojo are a non-profit organisation who teach coding to kids aged 7 – 17. During the event hundreds of kids from “Dojo’s” around the world came to showcase one of the projects they have been working on, and the best ones received an award from the sponsors. This year the event was attended by over 10,000 children and parents, with project entries from 17 countries (of which 32% of those were girls).
Symantec (supported by the Corporate Responsibility team and Norton’s UK marketing team) were a platinum sponsor of the event and our presence was made up of a number employee volunteers from across the Dublin campus, including Orla Cox and Sinead Docherty form the Senior Leadership team and a dozen other Symantec/Norton employees who enthusiastically (and kindly) gave up their time on a Saturday.
Symantec had the responsibility of judging the coding projects for the Website Category – supported by our judges Linda Brennan, Director Production and Fulfilment Enterprise, Laurent Chappe, Technical Consultant Customer Support, Natalie Corrigan, Principle Support Operational Specialist and Dirk Bremen, Senior Principle Business Ops Analyst from the Dublin office. This awards ceremony was a lively and fun experience for the kids involved and provided Symantec with a number of opportunities for brand awareness, thought leadership and education in this space. We were fortunate enough to have Orla Cox representing Symantec on stage with her educational and captivating presentation: “How Ransomware can make us WannaCry”
CoderDojo’s Coolest Project event is tied to and supports Symantec’s goal to excite, engage, and educate one million students in STEM education by 2020. Whether we were educating parents on speaking to their children on cyberbullying, helping children and parents to “chose the safer website”, communicating our consumer products or our Corporate Responsibility initiatives, we were able to interact with, inform and educate a huge number of children and parents on a number of very topical and important issues.