Over the last several weeks, groups of second-level students have been visiting the science laboratories at the Department of Experimental Physics at NUI Maynooth to perform experiments that would not be available to them otherwise.

Many of the experiments, which are on the Leaving Certificate syllabus, involve radioactivity, for which the students' schools do not have a licence. Others are simply fun activities designed to pique student interest in physics.

While at NUI Maynooth, the teenagers are introduced to a graphplotting computer programme that they use to analyse the data from their work. They are also taken on a complete tour of the undergraduate and postgraduate labs.