In the Hackers group at CoderDojo Athenry, we have a small team of experienced young people who are in secondary school and have worked their way up through the other groups, developing their coding skills.

This year, we are embarking on what might be our most ambitious project: to build a robot that will play Connect4 against humans – and win! This will involve a combination of:

• Robotics

• Computer Vision

• Artificial Intelligence

• 3D Printing

Our first phase was to brainstorm about the overall system design:

From that, we identified major tasks, and then developed a project plan:

Fortunately, the Hackers mentors, Michael Madden and Kevin Madden, are well placed to help and advise: Michael conducts research in AI and machine learning in University of Galway and the Insight Centre for Data Analytics, while Kevin has great experience of computer vision and 3D printing from personal projects and his work in Boston Scientific.

While we can’t guarantee that the project will work, it should be a good learning experience! I’ll post more updates in future weeks.