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”.

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.

We wish everyone a great Science Week and encourage all ages to get out to these great science events.

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.

Castlebar’s Maths Academy has been set up to help students, to excel at maths in both pass and higher level. The Academy does not take the form of grinds but instead is an accessible and enjoyable way of learning maths which involves problem solving and interaction with other students.

The Academy is run by Declan Holmes of Science Ireland who has over 15 years of experience of supporting Leaving Certificate students in both maths and science. The course covers the new “Project Maths” syllabus as well as focusing on Leaving Certificate questions.

This method has proven very popular with students at both pass and honours level as it builds their confidence over time by focusing on specific issues that students find difficult and working through these at their pace. The students work together in small groups, which aids learning and most importantly gives the students a repeatable method for problem solving which they can use in their exams.

The Academy will also present “Learn the Application of Maths” nights which will help students understand how maths relates to their everyday world.

The Maths Academy meets each Wednesday from 4.45 – 7pm in the Celtic Football Ground Clubhouse Meeting Room beside the Castlebar County Library and the first session is free. For more information call 087 9176292.

The shows are a great success with the latest of our shows in development at the moment, Battleship Maths is a interactive  game where students use maths to measure distance to target and use physics to launch projectiles to win the game. Battleship Maths will be launched on the Monday of Science Week 2011 in the RDS, Dublin.

Established by an ‘Ant and Dec’ of a different variety (Donegal man Anthony Caldwell and Declan Holmes of Newport, County Mayo) Science Ireland originally created physics shows and online courses as a means of increasing Leaving Certificate interest in the subject. Changing tack in 2007, the organisation began tailoring their services towards primary school students, and they were pleasantly surprised by the outcome “we discovered that the shows were extremely popular and this resulted in a new direction for us. We rebranded as Science Ireland as this was a more appropriate name for our new audience” says Declan.

This new direction worked well for Science Ireland, who’ve performed shows to 40,000 students in over 500 schools around the country. Offering five different types of show (physics, weather, rocket, electricity, magnetism and nanotechnology), Science Ireland have been delighted to note a marked increase in physics study in schools which they have regularly attended.
In addition to the shows, Science Ireland also developed a five day in-service course on the subject of “Activities in the Science Curriculum”, for teacher training at primary level. In 2009, the course was redeveloped as an online course with over 120 experiments.

While the primary school focus of Science Ireland is extremely successful, their initial aim has not been forgotten, says Anthony “we’d set out to develop an online course in physics – and I’m pleased to say that several modules of both Junior and Leaving Certificate have been developed and are available on www.physics.ie”. Anthony is currently conducting research at Queens University Belfast using the modules to examine student attitudes to physics online.

Regulars on Irish TV, Anthony and Declan have been featured most recently on the ‘Sattitude’ programme [rocket launching] and on ‘ICE’ [creating lightning]. In 2005, they won the ‘Innovation in Business Award’ at the Mayo Business Awards for their innovative approach to science education.

If you would like more information on Science Ireland, their upcoming anniversary events or other upcoming workshops and shows, please visit www.scienceireland.ie.