A student project that will help to make post-disaster emergency shelters safer has won the 2008 BT Young Scientist and Technology Exhibition. Dick Ahlstrom, Science Editor, reports.
Remarkably the winner, Emer Jones, is just 13 years old, the youngest winner yet of the award as Young Scientist of the Year.
A second-year student from Presentation Secondary School, Tralee, Co Kerry, Emer's project was entitled "Research and Development of Emergency Sandbag Shelters". Low cost dome-shaped huts of the type studied by Emer were used after the 2004 St Stephen's Day Asian tsunami and the more recent devastating earthquake in Pakistan.
Typically the tube-shaped sandbags are held in place by layers of barbed wire, but Emer wanted to improve on this. "Barbed wire isn't available in all countries and is both heavy and expensive," she said.
She looked at a number of alternatives, including the use of wood or bamboo spikes to hold the sand bags in position. She built a sprung platform that allowed her to carry out tests on her various designs, using a suspended 10lb sledge hammer to simulate the effects of an earthquake.
Emer demonstrated through experiments that the huts were much more stable when crossed spikes of bamboo were pushed into the bags. "The crossing is very important because it gave much better results than pushing the bamboo in vertically."
She got the idea for her project after seeing media reports about natural disasters. "I was always interested in structures. I wanted to do a project that wasn't just a science project but could do some good."
Although only in second year, she already has plans to study physics, chemistry or maths at third level. "You couldn't keep me away from science," she said.
Emer receives a crystal trophy and a cheque for €5,000. She also wins the chance to represent Ireland at this year's EU Contest for Young Scientists in Copenhagen.
The best group project award went to cousins Edel Ryan (15) and Fiona Ryan (16), transition-year students from Holy Rosary College, Mountbellew, Co Galway. Their project, "Living to Teach or Teaching to Live?" was an analysis of job satisfaction among teachers.
In the course of their project, they found a Master's in Education thesis from 1980 by Michael McCann. He had studied teachers' views in Galway so Edel and Fiona expanded on this, preparing a similar survey and bringing in results from 750 teachers from 24 schools in 17 counties.
They found that 97 per cent of teachers admitted to being under some level of stress, but they also found indicators that they still enjoyed their jobs. Just 10 per cent sought positions outside teaching and only 5 per cent job shared.
They also demonstrated a significant change in those involved in teaching. In 1980, 58 per cent of teachers were male, but their survey showed that now 73 per cent were female. They received a crystal trophy and a €2,400 cheque.
The runner-up individual project went to Henry Glass (16), a transition-year student from Clongowes Wood College, Co Kildare, with a project entitled, "The detection and locating of food by the slug limax pseudoflavus".
Henry had observed the ability of slugs unerringly to find a bowl of cat food left outdoors and wanted to understand how they managed it. He devised an elaborate series of experiments, looking at how far away they could detect the food, whether other factors such as previous slime trails might be a factor and how they orientated themselves in relation to a food source.
He found that the slugs steered by the smell of the food and were quite successful in tracking it down. They could find it over distance even without a breeze to carry the scent and they basically followed their nose. The project gave him a new interest in these creatures and he is now breeding another species, limax maximus, to conduct more experiments.
Henry received a crystal trophy and a cheque for €1,200. He hopes to study dentistry.
The runner-up group entry was an unusual project on the tearing characteristics of thin plastic films prepared by three fifth-year students from Coláiste Choilm, Ballincollig, Co Cork.
Ellie Townsend (16), Ciara McCarthy (17) and Lisa O'Sullivan (16), have a combined eight years of project presentations in the competition. They started looking at the unusual polarisation patterns that appear on thin films when stretched, but the project evolved into a more complex analysis of how perforated films, in this case plastic sandwich bags, tore when put under stress.
They carried out a series of experiments with perforated films under varying amounts of even and uneven stress. The patterns allowed them to study how the stress affected the plastic adjacent to the perforations. They found that slit perforations delivered the cleanest tear.
The three receive a crystal trophy and share a cheque for €1,200.