TU Dublin Students Bring Halloween Magic to LauraLynn Children’s Hospice
Over 30 TU Dublin students and staff brought creativity, compassion, and cutting-edge technology together for the Annual Halloween Makeathon at LauraLynn, Ireland’s Children’s Hospice. Now in its fifth year, the event saw Marketing, Engineering, and Advertising students, along with 3DAssist volunteers, collaborate to design and build terrifyingly cool wheelchair costumes for children at the hospice.
The celebrations began with the much-loved Halloween Parade at LauraLynn in Sandyford, where young residents and service users showcased their bespoke wheelchair costumes, each one specially crafted by TU Dublin’s talented students and staff. The event is always a highlight for everyone involved, combining festive fun with meaningful community engagement.
This year’s Makeathon took on an exciting new dimension thanks to funding from Google, which enabled TU Dublin students to work with four local primary schools. The students visited each school, introducing pupils to the design thinking process and demonstrating how 3D scanning and printing technology help bring creative ideas to life.
One standout collaboration came from St Maelruain's National School, which designed and built a full-size wheelchair costume for Cayden, a local boy recently featured on RTÉ’s DIY SOS: The Big Build Ireland. This partnership perfectly captured the Makeathon’s spirit by combining creativity, technology, and community to make a real difference.
The success of this initiative is made possible through the dedication of TU Dublin students, lecturers, and volunteers who give their time and expertise each year. Their work exemplifies TU Dublin’s commitment to practice-based learning, where students apply classroom knowledge in real-world settings to solve meaningful challenges.
TU Dublin extends sincere thanks to Google for their support and looks forward to expanding this heartwarming initiative to even more schools next year.
