It’s that time of the year when some of our brightest young minds descend on the RDS and impress us with the fruit of their labours.
As usual there is a vast spread of standard and subjects. To my mind too many of the projects are social science and statistical surveys, Attitudes to Abortion in the Border Counties for example. There is an amusing tendency for rural schools to focus on agricultural topics such as Davis College Cork’s entry Tractor Safety and the Calving Alert from Wicklow Community College, which sends the farmer a text when the cow goes into labour. I think this could be a winner.
Too many of the topics focus on Gaelic Games such as the Algorithm of a Gaelic Football teams performance which I feel will have little commercial use. Having said that Desmond College Limerick (who are very prominent here) produced an insert for hurling helmets made from cooling materials which could be a big success. Other notable sports based project included the chap from Cork who has designed lower leg armour which is a variation on the shinpad that goes from knee to ankle. This should be a surefire winner.
A chap from Castletroy College has produced a solar panel on a motor which tracks the sun so as to try to pick up the rays all day. A great idea and another on the solar theme was the manhole that was actually a solar panel to stop pipes freezing. A very sensible project was the smoke alarm that lit up strip lights on the skirting boards to guide you out of the house.
The virtual reality glove from a school in Mayo was very impressive but one of my favourites was the biology project from the girl from Loreto Balbriggan which discovered that garlic and oregano provide an antibiotic like defence against ecoli.
The winning project on bacteria in plant germination didn’t really grab me I have to confess.
All in all you’d leave this exhibition with great hope for our future.
Was Tubridy’s bird there? My mate was at it last year as he’s a teacher and he rang me in a state of some distress to spill, almost incoherently, his absolute disgust that a woman of such quality was doing a line with that scrawny cuntbag of a whelp.
Might pop down there tomorrow if it’s not over? Was reading that Ireland punches well above its weight in this sphere for young people, just seems to tail off then. Both those idea you mentioned are seriously commercial; limited opportunities to develop them with proper support I’d imagine though.
They had a piece on the 2020 Young Scientists on Morning Ireland there earlier. They spoke to participants from a representative sample of Dublin schools at the event, Belvedere, Loreto and Gonzaga.
The Belvo one about cyber security sounded very interesting. The Loreto one about do opposites attract seemed frivolous and I can’t remember what the Gonzaga one was about. As soon as the south Dublin drone started my mind took me elsewhere
This is the kind of ‘woke’ bolloxollogy that passes for science these days. And they want to give 16 year olds the vote? I await the disdain of the forums resident libertarians.
Not sure what the problem is here. They conducted a very interesting social sciences project and won an award. Getting worked up about sixteen year olds winning a competition is a bit silly, even for around here.
A cod of a competition. Projects being done by teachers and presented by the students. That’s the second time that school has won it in recent years. I heard of a school in Dublin, (Synge st I think) that had numerous wins over the years that were essentially the work of the teacher.
That’s not very fair or accurate. Shane Curran went to our school. All his project was 100% his own. Im sure the same can be said for the majority of projects.
