In April, young tech creators gathered at Explorium in Dublin for Coolest Projects Ireland 2026, a lively, creative celebration of young makers and their digital projects. This year’s event was held as part of Kinia’s Creative Technology Week, and welcomed over 100 young people, showcasing more than 80 incredible tech projects. Participants included young people from Code Clubs, CoderDojos, and schools across Ireland, as well as young creators taking part individually.

With creations ranging from coding projects to hardware builds to AI systems, the event provided a wonderful opportunity to celebrate the creativity and passion of young tech creators across Ireland. Here are some project highlights from the day.

Jake | Enter the Kindergarten, Scratch

Jake’s project, Enter the Kindergarten, is a Scratch game where the player has to dodge babies and obstacles in a childcare setting. Jake was inspired to create the game after overcoming his own fear of babies. Here is what he shared with us about his project:

“Well, I used to be afraid of babies. So one Saturday morning, me and my dad came up with the idea to make a kindergarten game where you have to get to the end of the kindergarten.”

Aarabhi | Mystical Waterfall, Hardware

To build her hardware project, Mystical Waterfall, Aarabhi used a Raspberry Pi Pico to create a nature scene, featuring running water and LED lights. Aarabhi spoke to us about why she wanted to enter Coolest Projects:

“I watched a Netflix series, The InBESTigators, where children showcase their science projects. After watching it, it was my dream to do the same!”

Arittra | Cara, AI

Arittra’s project, Cara, was chosen as the judges’ favourite in the AI category this year. Cara, which means ‘friend’ in Irish, is a large language model (LLM) that provides information on the Irish legal, housing, and administrative systems, aimed at supporting people who have emigrated to Ireland. Arittra told us more about the challenges he faced whilst building his project:

“One of the key problems with artificial intelligence is that they hallucinate, but I found a countermeasure to it. I trained it on search variety and gave it backup data, so if one part of the server starts hallucinating, another part automatically steps into its place to find maximum accuracy.”

Get involved

Congratulations and thank you to each and every young creator who joined us for Coolest Projects Ireland 2026. Sharing your projects, celebrating your achievements, and inspiring others is what Coolest Projects is all about.

Missed the fun in Dublin, or want to take your projects to a global stage? Take part in the Coolest Projects 2026 online showcase, which is open for entries from young creators anywhere in the world until 27 May. Look out for more in-person Coolest Projects events taking place around the world over the rest of the year, too!

Find out more at coolestprojects.org.