This article is from page 34 of the 2007-06-19 edition of The Clare People. OCR mistakes are to be expected so download the original SWF or the rendered page 34 JPG
MARY Immaculate Secondary School in Lisdoonvarna is celebrat- ing huge success by several students in the Northern Ireland Young Scien- tist Competition held in Belfast last Neto)
Fifth year student Laura Sims won first prize in her age category for the project ‘Mobile phone signal strength and topography ’- the second time she has won a prize for her sci- entific skills.
Matthew Egan and Kevin Theasby were runners up in their age category with ‘Relationship between Japanese Knotweed and soil type’.
Diarmaid O’ Donoghue was award- ed the Queens University Award for Biological Sciences for his project ‘The efficiency of seed dispersal’
and a fourth group of Amie Barrett, Sinead McNamara and Megan Byrne also took part with “The dispersal patterns of Patella vulgate on north Clare shores’.
The supervisor of the projects, Ge- ography teacher John Sims, said that his daughter and the other students had done the school proud.
‘This was the sixth year that we have taken part in the competition and we have never come away with- out a prize of some sort. All of these projects were picked because they also did well in the Irish competition. It takes passion and hard work to get everything done. It really helps kids to think outside the box.”
He added that one of the judges had complimented 17 year-old Laura on a particularly good project.
‘She worked on it since last August
and it was very intense because she had to physically map out the grid on foot and the terrain is not great. She used a mapping program called Geo- graphical Information Systems being piloted at the school by NUI May- nooth and the coverage she got was second to none. The results could be very useful, as could those of all of the other projects.”
Mr Sims said that Kevin, Mat- thew and Diarmaid had to do a crash course in the more advanced school curriculum to learn techniques like soil sample collection.
“They were in the junior category and started work in September. The Irish competition is early in the year SO work was very heavy over Christ- mas. Aside from the actual projects, they had to type up reports of up to 50 pages.
He added that the fourth project, in a category with a higher number of participants, could still get a ‘Highly Commended’ honour.
“IT have worked at the school since 1989 and past students often refer to the Young Scientist as a very useful experience. A lot of kids knew how to do reports and project work at col- lege later, which 1s a great plus.”
The students used a mix of labora- tory and field work as well as a wide variety of research methods.
After the summer, a new batch of young scientists will begin work at the school.