Louth students excel at Young Scientist’s event
It was another successful year for Louth’s top young scientists as competing students brought home nine awards from the national event last week.
Local students faced tough competition, with the 2017 exhibition featuring 550 projects, including seventeen from schools in County Louth.
St. Vincent’s Secondary entered the largest number of projects from any Louth school, and their efforts certainly paid off as they took home a special award (see below).
Three projects were ‘ highly commended’ at the event including ‘How does music affect sleep?’ led by Leah Finnegan, Damilola Alabi and Denise Walsh.
The students investigated whether music affects sleep quality, and if low frequency or high frequency sounds had the greater impact.
Eve Morrisey from St. Vincent’s was highly commended for her project looking at whether ‘different sock materials affect the surface temperature of the foot during racket sports.’
Meanwhile the prize winning students behind the project looking at different means of diabetic retinal screening were also highly commended.
Bush Post Primary, who have an excellent record at the Young Scientist exhibition received a highly commended award for their project on a new project called ‘ Ultra Clean Caps.’
Peter Suresh along with Oliver McGuinness and Barry Dunne built what is essentially a cooler bag which sterilises sports bottles, preventing the spread of unwanted pathogens from player to player.
They tested the product on sports bottles from a football game and found that all germs were eradicated.
Delighted with the recognition they received, the boys added that they were ‘very excited to share the results with the judges and the public at the exhibition.’
Meanwhile, new Dundalk school Colaiste Chu Chulainn were also highly commended for their project focused on ‘ hydrobags -are they a protection against flooding?’
The overall winner of the 53rd BT Young Scientist & Technology Exhibition was Shane Curran, aged 16, a 5th year student from Terenure College, Dublin 6.
He took home the top prize for his project entitled ‘qCrypt: The quantum-secure, encrypted, data storage solution with multijurisdictional quorum sharding technology’.