ENTIRE Workshops
A Look Behind the Scenes: Our Primary School Visits
In just eight months, 546 students from 15 schools across Ireland have stepped into our world hacking simulations, Raspberry Pi sensors, VR headsets, robotic cars, and cybersecurity lockbox challenges. This isn’t your average school trip. This is hands-on, minds-on STEM education that sticks.
Our two-day primary school workshop programme was designed with one goal: show young people that technology isn’t just something that happens to them it’s something they can shape, question, and build. Here’s what that actually looks like in practice.
The Stats:
- 🏫 15 schools visited across Ireland
- 📚 23 class groups engaged
- 👩💻 546 students reached
- ⚖️ 58.5% male / 41.5% female
- 🎯 35% of students came from DEIS schools
“Early exposure to AI, cybersecurity, and digital technologies is essential for developing a strong national talent pipeline and fostering cyber resilience across society. These workshops equip students with practical digital literacy skills, encourage curiosity in STEM, and help cultivate the next generation of innovators, researchers, and cyber professionals.” – Dr Cliodhna Sargent, Education and public engagement manager, Nimbus Research, Centre MTU Cork.
7 Activities. 2 Days. Real-World Tech.
Every workshop is packed with seven distinct activities, each designed to spark curiosity, build critical thinking, and connect technology to students’ everyday lives.
Exploring AI
Is it real or fake? That’s the question students are wrestling with as they interact with ChatGPT on tablets and play our AI image detection game. This activity doesn’t just introduce artificial intelligence — it gets students thinking critically about what they see online, how AI shapes their world, and why that matters. It’s one of the most eye-opening sessions of the two days.
Cyber Range Demo
Think like a hacker. Students get a front-row seat at our state-of-the-art Cyber Range, witnessing a live demo showing how a hacker could breach the systems of a multinational company. It’s dramatic, it’s real, and it makes cybersecurity feel urgent and exciting — not abstract.
XR Lab Demo
Welcome to the future. Students explore our Extended Reality lab, seeing how researchers are developing VR and mixed reality technology for use in communities, businesses, and gaming. And yes — they get to put on the headsets themselves. Few things spark a student’s imagination quite like stepping into a virtual world for the first time.
Introduction to Networking
Ever wonder what’s actually happening when you connect to Wi-Fi? Students connect their tablets to a live router and watch their own data appear on screen in real time. It’s a moment that transforms something invisible and everyday into something tangible — and it always gets a reaction.
Sensors
Your phone knows when it’s dark. Your car knows when something is too close. But how? Using Crow Pi2 laptops powered by Raspberry Pi, students run hands-on experiments with light sensors, PIR sensors, cameras, ultrasonic sensors, touch sensors, and tilt sensors. From there, the conversation turns to the real-world importance of sensor accuracy — and what happens when security fails.
Programming
This one runs in three stages — and every stage builds on the last. It starts with Sphero Indi cars: students use coloured tiles to navigate their car through a maze to the purple tile at the centre. Simple in theory, tricky in practice — and a brilliant introduction to problem-solving, patience, and the importance of giving clear, precise instructions.
Once they’ve nailed that, students move to Scratch programming on their tablets to control ELEGOO smart robotic cars through the same maze. By the end, they’re not just following instructions. They’re writing them.
Cybersecurity Lockbox Challenge
The grand finale. Students are divided into company departments and tasked with solving cybersecurity challenges to unlock lockboxes — and stop a hacker from getting into the company network. It’s competitive, collaborative, and surprisingly revealing about how real-world cyber threats work. Each challenge ties directly into how students can be safer online.
What’s Next: Our Cybersecurity Academy
The momentum built in these workshops doesn’t stop at primary school. Our Cybersecurity Academy, launching mid-June 2026, is the next step for those ready to go deeper. Designed to develop the next generation of cyber professionals, it offers an immersive, expert-led experience for students who want to turn curiosity into a career path.
Whether you’re a parent, teacher, school principal, or industry partner — if you believe in building Ireland’s digital future from the ground up, we’d love to connect.
To Conclude:
The Power of Learning by Doing
There’s a reason these workshops don’t involve sitting at a desk and reading from a textbook. Research consistently shows that hands-on, experiential learning leads to deeper understanding, better retention, and greater enthusiasm for the subject. When a student watches their own data light up a screen in real time, or physically programmes a car through a maze, something clicks that no PowerPoint slide could achieve. They’re not just learning about technology — they’re doing it.
And in 2026, that couldn’t matter more. Cyber threats are no longer the concern of large corporations and governments alone. From phishing scams targeting individuals to ransomware attacks crippling public services, the digital risks we all face are growing in scale and sophistication every year. Yet awareness remains one of the most powerful defences we have. A young person who understands how a hacker thinks, what a suspicious link looks like, or why strong passwords matter is already better protected — and better prepared to protect others.
That’s what this programme is really about. Not just building future cyber professionals, though we hope to do plenty of that. It’s about sending every student home a little more curious, a little more confident, and a lot more clued in to the world they’re growing up in.
