Sci-tech festival Inspirefest comes to Dublin

A new international three-day sci-tech festival is taking place in Dublin this week, with the aim of showcasing diversity and leadership in science, technology, engineering and maths.

Inspirefest will feature keynotes and panel discussions from speakers including Black Girls Code founder Kimberly Bryant, astrophysicist Dame Jocelyn Bell Burnell, Intel vice president Margaret Burgraff, CoderDojo chief executive Mary Moloney, Lucas Point Ventures founder Adam Quinton and Fidelity vice president John Basile.

The festival will feature film screenings including the Irish premiere of Code: Debugging the Gender Gap, The Computers and Codebreaker. The Computers tells the largely untold story of six women who programmed ENIAC, the world's very first all-electronic, programmable computer as part of a secret World War II military project in Philadelphia, while Codebreaker tells the story of Alan Turing, a British officer whose code-breaking skills helped the Allies immensely.

The festival will close on Saturday with a day of free workshops in Merrion Square Park. From coding to hardware hacking, there will be workshops for kids and adults, from groups such as CoderDojo, Dublin Maker and Coding Grace.

Minister of State for Innovation Damien English, said the importance of boosting diversity and gender balance within the Irish, and indeed international, science, technology, engineering and maths (Stem) sectors, cannot be overstated.

“A key factor for multinational companies considering creating jobs in Ireland is access to a skilled . . . workforce, particularly in Stem sectors. In order to ensure sustained economic growth Stem subjects must appeal to 100 per cent of the population.”