As the doors to the young scientists open, a range of enterprising projects spring to life
THREE STUDENTS in their second-last year at Loreto Community School in Donegal have come up with a startling conclusion – Irish culture is dying out largely because of modern technology.
Shaun Sweeney (17), Eoin Ferry (17) and Kealan Blake (16) completed a battery of surveys and talked to people of all age groups to make the connection. They presented their findings yesterday on the opening day of the BT Young Scientist and Technology Exhibition at the RDS in Dublin.
Most new technologies such as Facebook, Twitter and iPhones are mainly used by young people and shunned by older people, Sweeney said. They wanted to see how age groupings across six categories from 10 to 69 responded to this, surveying 120 people in the process.
They found that 70 per cent of those aged 50 years and older felt people were happier before the new technologies existed. Only 10 per cent of 10 to 19-year-olds could identify Christy Moore, but 100 per cent of them identified an iPod, while only 10 per cent of those over 60 could do so.
“If they don’t try to fix the problem our Irish culture will be gone forever,” Sweeney said.
“I think it gives an identity to our nation and should not be lost,” Ferry added.
Irish culture in terms of language came under the scrutiny of Eimear Ahern and Cliona Joyce, both 16 and transition-year students at Coláiste Choilm in Cork. They wanted to see whether those who came up from an Irish language primary school did better generally than students entering secondary level from an English language school.
Most students believed this to be true, Joyce said. They needed data to back this up, however, and so they analysed school results for pupils going through their school at Junior and Leaving Cert level. “We found that the students from Irish schools did better at more creative subjects,” Ahern said.
There was a big difference on average with those from Irish schools averaging a B2 compared to a C2 in English and an A1 to B3 in art.
Ciara Walsh, Ruth Dargan and Kate O’Regan were thinking less about culture and more about the planet in their project to design and produce an iPhone and Android app that calculates your carbon footprint. The three are TY students at Loreto College, St Stephen’s Green and they had to learn three IT languages to be able to produce their app.
“It was quite challenging at times. We used online tutorials and a book from America,” Dargan said. They had some help but had to do all the coding themselves, O’Regan added.
The app is geared specifically to teenagers and so it lists devices used by them, including hairdryers and tongs, computers and DVD players but not washing machines, Walsh said.
The app is now available online and can be downloaded by going to Facebook and searching for carboncalculator. The app also provides tips on how to reduce your footprint and reasons why it is important.
It was back to basics for Éanna Reynolds (13), a first year at Ardgillan Community College in Dublin. “I wanted to find a way to keep slugs and snails away from crops. My dad is a farmer and they are a real pest,” he said.
He ran tests to see what foods the snails preferred and then tried to block them, trying natural irritants such as peppers and rosemary, but these did nothing. Then he tried seaweed, which kept the creatures at bay because of its high salt content. “We found that it was the natural way to keep them away,” he said. It also meant no chemicals were needed.
He said it might be possible to plant seeds and then spread seaweed over lands to prevent snail and slug infestation. It was a technique he believed his grandfather used when he farmed the land.