TWIN brothers Conor and Ronan Burke (19) from Limerick’s Ennis Road have recently created an app to help students analyse and compare CAO points requirements across all Irish third-level institutions.
The app, called CAO Points Checker, collates, graphs and compares the CAO points needed for 1,325 courses offered in Irish colleges over the last eight years.
Conor Burke said: “Graphing these points helps students visualise trends and anticipate future points requirements of their desired courses. We are also working on a prediction algorithm for CAO points which we hope to have completed for the 2014 CAO application process.”
The twins sat their leaving certificate in Ardscoil Rís this year, after which Conor started learning a computer programming language called Ruby on Rails.
He explained: “My objective for the summer was to learn to code and develop an application. The CAO point checker seemed like a useful app which my peers and thousands of other students would benefit from. To build the app I used what I had learned from online tutorials and reached out to experienced developers if I came across any problems.”
The twins picked up their leaving cert results last week with Conor receiving over 550 points, enough to secure his first choice of engineering in UCD.
He commented: “I would like to focus on the electronic and computer engineering aspect of the course so working on these projects should be a good foundation for the future.”
The app is the brothers’ second project as they have also set up their own company AirNFC, which is the first in Ireland to supply NFC (Near Field Communications) technology that allows electronic devices to exchange information with each other.
Conor and Ronan have been supplying products worldwide for the past year and designed and developed the site themselves.
