Westmeath's Young Scientists in RDS this week for exhibition
The 40 teams and individual entrants from Westmeath in the 2023 BT Young Scientist and Technology Exhibition are this week setting up their stands at the RDS.
The phenomenally high representation for Westmeath means this county is third highest in terms of entries, behind Cork (132 projects) and Dublin coming (94 entries).
The public exhibition takes place in the RDS from this Thursday January 12 to Saturday January 14. The prizewinners will be named at the awards ceremony on Friday evening.
In total, 557 entries were selected for this year’s exhibition, which returns to an in-person event after two years of virtual exhibitions.
The Westmeath entries are drawn from 10 secondary schools. The community colleges of Athlone and Moate have nine entries each; Coláiste Mhuire in Mullingar and Marist College, Athlone, have five apiece.
Mercy Kilbeggan is responsible for four of the entries and there are two apiece from St Finian’s College in Mullingar, St Joseph’s in Kilbeggan and Our Lady’s Bower in Athlone. Castlepollard Community College and Loreto College Mullingar have one entry each.
The breadth of topics which Westmeath’s young scientists are examining covers everything from farming to health; culture to invention.
A question an Athlone Community College student is investigating is whether magnets can be used to fuel cars; a St Finian’s College pupil is examining the ‘Gym Bro’ culture in adolescent males, while a Coláiste Mhuire student is studying “the economy of cannabis”.
The entry from Castlepollard Community College is entitled ‘The Name Game’, and it aims at determining whether people are judged on their first name rather than on observed ability.
The thorny question of whether working during the school term has a positive or negative impact on a teenager’s life is being put under the microscope by a team from Mercy Kilbeggan, while a team from St Joseph’s Secondary School in Rochfortbridge is looking at how to break the boundaries around the area of organ donation.
Twenty-five out of the 40 are group projects, and the other 15 are individual.
The Social and Behavioural Sciences category is the field into which 15 of the entries fall while 12 of the projects are in under the Biological and Ecological heading.
The Technology field has attracted nine entries with four entered in the Chemical, Physical and Mathematical Sciences category.
Neighbouring Offaly has had seven projects selected; Meath and Longford have had five apiece selected; Cavan has three projects going through, but Roscommon has also fared well, with 15 projects selected.
Westmeath has had considerable success in the competition in the past and three overall winners came from local schools. The first to win national glory for a Westmeath school was Noel Boyle, of St Finian’s College, Mullingar, whose project was: ‘A study of photoelectric cells and construction of a spectrophotometer’.
In 1982, Moate Convent student Martyn Sheehan proposed: ‘Lichens may be used for medicine’.
Nineteen years later, Adnan Osmani from St Finian’s College won with his project: ‘The graphical technological and user-friendly advancement of the Internet browser’.