Science Ireland published new article in Physics Education
Science Ireland has published an article entitled ‘Give me a lever and a place to stand and I’ll move the world’ in which we describe how the Archimedes principle of law of the lever may be applied. We calculated how far away a person would have to stand to literally move the world. Please click here to read the article.
Coderdojo in Mayo
Declan Holmes of Science Ireland has helped to setup Coderdojo in Castlebar, Co. Mayo. Coderdojo is a coding club for young people. Setup last year by James Whelton who setup a computer club in his school (PBC Cork) where he started teaching basic HTML and CSS. Last year he met Bill Liao, a entrepreneur and philanthropist, who was interested in growing the project into something bigger than just an after-school computer club. In June 2011 the first CoderDojo was launched in the National Software Centre in Cork where CoderDojo saw extreme success. There are now over 50 Coderdojos and they are now worldwide from San Francisco to St Petersburg.
Declan who has a background in HTML, CSS, PHP and Mysql setup the Coderdojo last Saturday. Over 100 students attend three sessions. The first two where based on Scratch and were given by Brendan Smith from the Galway Coderdojo. Scratch is a very simple why to get young kids into code by draging and droping code. The last session was for older more advanced students and we started we codeacedemy and vpython but we hope to move on to develop games and apps for the Android phones.
The Coderdojo is on every second Saturday for 11:30 to 4pm in the Mayo Education Centre Castlebar.
If you are interested in coming email Declan on
Science Ireland at STEM conference
Science Ireland was at the Atlantic Corridor STEM conference in Tullamore on 29th March. Very enjoyable with some great talks. The highlights were Professor Fergal O’Brien, Associate Professor, Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland and currently heads one the largest regenerative medicine research groups in Ireland. Very strong speaker and it is great to see that Science Foundation Ireland can bring a professor from MIT and Harvard back to Ireland. Amazing what can be done to regenerate bones, he is an engineer and uses his skills in the area of regenerative medicine.
Marc Watson, President, TEQ Games part of Imagine Creative Technology a Universal Studios company. A great talk on using emersive expierences and games to get weak students in maths and science. Marc who is a former Lieutenant Commander in the United States Navy has gone on to designed theme park rides such as Spiderman for Universal Studios. His company has created National Flight Academy, which poses real problems such as how to evacuation civilians before a tsunami hits. Students are totally ingrossed in the experience because the problems are so real and the challenge is set up like a movie or interactive game.
Carol-Lynn Parente, Senior Vice President and Executive Producer, Sesame Street. Carol is responsible for overseeing production for Sesame Workshop’s landmark television program and serves as a creative guide to keep the program fresh and exciting. She developed a STEM section to the show, by adding new characters such as Super Grover 2.0 who tries to do experiments but they always goes wrong.
The conference ending with a presentation by students of Gallen Community School, Ferbane. This is an important part of the conference and great to get insights into what students of today think.
Our choice projects at BT Young Scientists
We just wanted to let people know about the great talented young scientists we have here in Ireland. Science Ireland’s Declan Holmes visited the BT Young Scientist competition on Friday. Here are some of the projects that caught his attention, some for the great passion the students had for explaining their projects and some for the physics involved.
Project: iCollapse: A mobile phone application for assisting those are liable to collapse
Students: Luke Benson, Donnchadh Barry, Paul McDonagh from St Geralds College Castlebar.
These students examined the data from the accelerometer of a smartphone to model what happens when a person collapses. The app detects the fall, waits a short delay to make sure the person didn’t drop it and then sends out a beeping signal and calls two contacts on the phone. The students plan to incorporate a GPS location into the app in the future. This project won the Google Trailblazers award in technology, so congrats to the students for that. I have to mention that I was a student of St Geralds College back in the day.
Project: Halo: Fire safety system
Student: Eve Mc Lelland, Grosvenor Grammer School, Antrim
Eve projected laser light down through the water in a water sprinkler system. This works similar to the fibre optic demonstration where you shine a laser through a bottle of water that has a hole in it, the laser light with travel down the spout of water. The project will shine red in a route that is not the way out and green light to highlight the exit. The project materials where of a high standard, business card, sketch book and a 3D printer was used.
Project: Library Book Trailer
Students: James O’Connell, Cian Reid, Sean Nicholson, St Michaels College, Dublin
The project involved using two different technologies to find lost books in college libraries. They used RFID (Radio-frequency identification) which will tell the person which bookcase to go to. The students then plan to use NFC (Near field communication) which allows a smartphone to find the book on the shelf to within 10cm. The students are using the latest technology, I was trying to see a demo of the system at work but the NFC chip they are planning to use has not been launched. The chip is being launched by an Irish company Decaware.
Project: Music through aluminium foil in a magnetic field.
Students: Aimee Russell and Lisa Patterson, Ballyclare High School, Antrim
I loved this project and would give it a prize if I could for the simplicity of it. The students where doing the force on a conductor experiment in physics where you place a conductor in a magnetic field and pass a current through it, the conductor will move. Their teacher mentioned that you could use this to play music. The students decided to test this so they got a microphone and recorded some sound. When they replayed the sound through an amplifier which was ran through a 30cm piece of aluminium foil, you could hear that sound. This is a great project because it takes a standard physics experiment and shows people very simply what sound is and how a loadspeaker works.
Well done to all the students who took part in the BT Young Scientist competition and congrats to this years winners Leaving Cert students Eric Doyle and Mark Kelly, both aged 17, from Synge Street CBS for their project entitled, “Simulation accuracy in the gravitational many-body problem”.
Science Ireland a great 10 Years
Science Ireland which runs the True Physics Project is celebrating its 10th year travelling to schools with our interactive science shows. Our 10 year celebration was held in GMIT Castlebar on 27th May with local national schools. In September we launched Maths Academy, the aim of which is to teach maths through practical applications to students working in small groups, Maths Academy will run again during March/April 2012 in Mayo.
In Sept, Anthony Caldwell of Science Ireland completed his MPhil in Information Systems in Queens University Belfast on students attitudes to online education based on our website physics.ie. In the same month, we published an article in Physics Education, an Institute of Physics peer-reviewed journal, on a simple method of reproducing Joule’s experiment on heat.
For science week we developed “Battleship Maths” as part of the RDS Science Live lecture series, which showed students the practical application of maths by launching projectiles to hit a target. Also during science week, we created our new Science Fair show for national schools, the Science Fair gets everyone in the schools involved in science for the day.
In Dec 2011, we tested our Physics Problem Solving Workshop, which is a half day transition year module to explore students abilities to work on physics problems and to encourage the uptake in Leaving Certificate physics.
Looking forward to 2012, we hope to continue publishing articles as well as online content to help teachers and students with STEM subjects. We will complete the Physics Problem Solving Workshop and offer it to schools who need to keep the numbers doing physics up. According to the Institute of Physics, in 2011, only 11% of students took Leaving Certificate physics and 25% of schools do not offer physics as a choice. This is a worrying trend but we are confident that with our new method of teaching physics this trend can be reversed.
Happy New Year and we are all looking forward to 2012, where Dublin will host the City of Science festival, which will bring educators and researchers from around the world to Dublin.
Science Week is Here
Science Week is here and we at Science Ireland are booked out with shows all over the country. We start on Sunday at the Sligo Science Festival. Then onto the RDS for the first showing of our new show “Battleship Maths”. On Tuesday, we are launching Rockets in Limerick and Wednesday we are running a science competition for the Mayo Science festival. Thursday is an exciting day of shows in the Museum of Country Life in Castlebar and Friday is a full day of science experiments in Holy Family National School in Newport, Co. Mayo.
We wish everyone a great Science Week and encourage all ages to get out to these great science events.
Battleship Maths Game Tested
Science Ireland’s new maths game “Battleship Maths” got its first test with 100 third years in a school in Sligo. The two shows were a great success and the feedback for the students was constructive and honest.
Battleship Maths is a game where students will use trigonometry, co-ordinate geometry and physics to destroy the opponents ships. Battleship Maths has been accepted for the RDS Science Live Lecture Series and will be launched for Science Week 2011.
There will be two fleets of battleships, the science fleet and maths fleet. The names of the battleships will be named after famous scientists and mathematicians e.g. LE Boyle, LE Hamilton. The battleships will work together to destroy the other fleet.
The room will be laid out in two grids with a low screen between the grids. The battleships will be represented by a large bucket that will serve as a target, it needs to be deep to stop the ping pong balls bouncing out. Each battleship team will have a launcher and two theodolites (to measure angles). Students will not be able to see the opponent battleships directly but there will be a tall flag in each battleship which teams can use to measure angles.
Students will work in teams of six, two will deal with the launcher, one angle and one force, two will measure distance to target by measuring angles and using maths to determine distance. The other team members will decide strategy such as the speed/direction of the battleship and talking to the fleet.
The students will build a projectile launcher and then calibrate it to determine the launch speed of the projectile in this case a ping pong ball. The launcher will use a simple elastic band launch system. Once the students have built and calibrated their launcher they must find the best angle and speed to hit a target area.
The second part is to understand how to determine the distance to the target. This is accomplished by two team members one standing at the location of the battleship and one standing at the edge of the grid. They can measure the distance between them off the grid and then they both measure the angle between them and the opponent flag. Once the two angles and the distance between them are found the distance to target can be calculated by using trigonometry.
The game will have several rounds and the game will end if one fleet is destroyed or the time runs out, in this case the fleet with the most intact battleships will win.
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