About 11,000 people visited the Esat Telecom Young Scientists Exhibition at the RDS at the weekend.
Among them was the Minister for Education, Mr Martin, who spent some time at the stands listening to students explain their projects.
It was clear that young people expected the Minister to understand and absorb a lot of complex information in a short period.
Mr Martin nodded amiably as some of the more abstruse chemical, physical and mathematical science projects were explained to him.
Even meeting Raphael Burke, this year's overall winner - with his analysis of the board game Monopoly based on Markov chain calculations and probability theory - did not throw the Minister.
After all, complex mathematics is bread-and-butter to someone used to calculating the transfers in a five-seat constituency in Cork South Central, although the last time anyone in Fianna Fail mentioned chaos theory was when Albert Reynolds said he wanted to be President.
The fact that the winning project was maths-based represented an upturn in the fortunes of mathematics in the Young Scientists.
In the early years of the exhibition, mathematical entries scooped the top prize several times but in recent times such projects have not enjoyed the same degree of success.
Raphael, a student at Colaiste an Spioraid Naoimh, Cork, could well have applied his mathematical prowess to assessing the odds on a male student winning the overall title of Young Scientist of the Year in the first place.
This year's exhibition, the first to be sponsored by Esat Telecom since Aer Lingus ended more than three decades of association with the Young Scientists, continued the tradition of female entrants significantly outnumbering the males.
Of almost 700 students who participated this year, 439 were female and they outnumbered the males in all areas except chemical, physical and mathematical sciences.
The Minister appeared to find several projects in the social and behavioural sciences closer to his heart, and to his departmental budget.
With the Department of Education investing £50 million in providing Internet access for schools, a study of the current use of the Internet in schools by Emily Harrold (12) and Niamh Farrell (12) of Muckross Park College, Dublin, attracted his attention.
Only one out of 24 schools surveyed in Dublin had no computers at all.
While Internet use tended to be limited to older students in girls' schools, boys' schools showed a wider range in the age of users.
The Minister also instructed a departmental group examining ways to reduce the weight of schoolbags to contact three students from Clifden Community School, Galway, Evelyn McLoughlin, Mary McDonagh and Sibeal Laffan, who surveyed 1,400 students and found 92 per cent carried overloaded schoolbags, including one six-stone girl who was forced to shoulder a bag weighing 2 1/2 stone.
Esat Telecom has committed itself to sponsoring the Young Scientists Exhibition into the next millennium.
Commenting on this year's exhibition, Mr Martin said it reinforced the message that companies were investing in Ireland because of the "calibre, high skills and intelligence of the young people".