Seamus O'Neill

– Seamus O’Neill (Over 50 years in education): Seamus O’Neill has been an imaginative primary teacher during his long professional career. From before and since he left classroom teaching he has been in demand for curriculum-based CPD in Art, Maths and Scratch coding. CoderDojo Pioneer: Seamus is a pioneer, volunteer and entrepeneur. He set up one of the first Irish CoderDojos, in Navan over 6 years ago. He believes code at school should be (and can be) just as much fun and exciting for girls and boys at school as it is in CoderDojo – a non-school activity which attracts far less girls than boys. Maths & Coding Research: He co-authored the ‘Mathemagic’ and ‘Mata Draíochta‘ text books which has been the most popular primary maths text series in Ireland, used in almost 80% of primary schools. Most recently (2017) the developers of SCRATCH, the MIT Media Lab (Boston) contacted Seamus to add his Ready-Steady-Code component into the world’s top children’s programming language. Scratch has over 32 million users, and the Ready-Steady-Code vector grids have improved Scratch for children and teachers worldwide. Since then he published his book ‘SCRATCH with Ready-Steady-Code’ and children’s Flip-books and support resources (e.g. Magnetic Scratch, Staff-room Mugs in Irish and English) to simplify and add fun to learning Maths with Code at school for all teachers who teach Maths Maths & Environment Resources: When Mathemagic was introduced, the Departments of Education and of the Environment (as well several County Councils) engaged him to run a project that supported both Maths teaching and Environmental good practice. This project was also supported by Kelloggs and TetraPak.