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”.

New Education and Skills Minister Mary Coughlan has backed a bonus-point system for higher Leaving Certificate maths in a significant U-turn in government policy.

Her announcement came as five leading multinational companies confirmed 175 job vacancies in the technology sector.

And a nanoscience research institute, CRANN, which is based at Trinity College Dublin and University College Cork, separately announced that it is to create 17 new research and development jobs after it was awarded €15.5m in non-Exchequer funding.

The poor uptake in higher-level maths is regarded as a major obstacle to producing enough qualified graduates to develop the ‘smart economy’.

Article in Irish Independent (Thursday April 08 2010) By Katherine Donnelly and John Walshe
Read the full article here.