Xperience Engineering

We hosted the Xperience Engineering today at the Helix in DCU. There were 40 junior schools who reached the finals, out of 150 schools who entered nationwide.

It was a wonderful, brilliant, noisy, enthusiastic, inspiring day. The heroes of the event were of course the teachers who provide so much leadership and inspiration to our young people. And they were ably supported by parents, grandparents, uncles, aunts, cousins, older brothers and sisters, and guardians. The success of the event also depends so much on volunteers and companies across the Engineering profession, who freely give their time and access for school visits to their operations, to excite and enthuse our next generation of engineers - and leaders. I also want to sincerely thank the wonderful STEPS team in Clyde Road - what an honour to work with them.

We are dependent on financial support from our commercial partners - e.g. the ESB donated some laptops as prizes, and Hasbro have been wonderful in their support - and government agencies - in particular Discover Science and Engineering, Fas, and the Department of Education and Science.

For both the Junior (3rd/4th class) and Senior (5th/6th class) Engineering Class of the Year, we had incredibly beautiful once-off, unique, statuettes made by Ciaran Byrne of the Air Corps.


I have many duties and responsibilities as the Honorary President until next spring. Today was a wonderful, happy, exciting inspirational celebration of the creativity and innovation of our young people, all of whom shouted and shouted and shouted again the answer of what do you want to be: "engineer!".