STUDENTS from around the county are in Dublin this week to take part in the BT Young Scientists Exhibition at the RDS and Tralee schools are represented in three projects: two from Gaelcholáiste Chiarraí and one from Presentation Secondary School.
The Gaelcholaiste’s entries focus on ‘Using water energy buoys to reduce coastal erosion whilst generating electricity’ and ‘Reducing carbon dioxide emissions and road deaths’.
Three Transition Year students Ursula Ní Mhochóir, Lorraine De Nais and Janine Ní Chonchúir have been working on their project on wave energy and coastal erosion since September.
“It’s a project on harnessing wave power while preventing coastal erosion,” said Ursula. “We know coastal erosion is a big problem, especially in Ballybunion where we saw the effects over a year, so we decided to have a look at it. We researched it a lot and found out about wave energy and decided to incorporate that into the project,” she said.
The girls made a model which will demonstrate their findings to judges at the exhibition.
Their fellow schoolmate, Laura Ni Eidhin, a second year student, will be bringing her project on ‘Reducing carbon dioxide emissions and road deaths’ to the exhibition.
She has already finished Runner-Up in the Best Project category for her ‘Sábhálacht ar ár mbothaire – Safety on our roads (A statistical analysis of driver knowledge)’ project at the Scifest at the ITT in May 2014.
She has now developed her project further for the Young Scientists exhibition.
“Since we started going to the Young Scientists exhibition we’d normally have about two projects each year,” said science teacher, Elaine Ní Dheargáin. “We’ve been highly commended one year and won a display award a few years ago, so there’s a good science tradition in the school,” she said.
Over in Presentation Secondary, Transtition Year student, Ciara Begley, was a late entry into the exhibition.
“Ciara spent a lot of time over Christmas on the project as she got a late call-up on December 18,”said her science teacher, Kay O’Mahony.
“We’re thrilled she was called up, but it was short notice. We’ve had numerous entries in the exhibition over the years with one of our students, Emer Jones, winning the overall prize in 2008,” she said.
Ciara’s project ‘Does Physical Training Cause Injury’ explores how injuries occur by overtraining and not warming up correctly while coming to recommendations on how to help avoid these injuries.
“It’s mainly about how not warming up correctly, or overtraining, results in injuries,” Ciara said. “I interviewed physical trainers about it and did research into the subject over Christmas. I found 53% of women received ligament injuries by not warming up properly,” she said.
Among her recommendations are that trainers should record players injuries and how they happened and that all GAA trainers should be sent on courses in the latest developments in physical training and on how to do proper warm-ups and warm-downs to prevent injuries.
The BT Young Scientist Exhibition starts today and continues until Saturday. Best of luck to all Kerry students.