Moate TYs attend the BT Young Scientists Exhibition to support their competing fellow students

Darragh Counihan writes about his experience at the Exhibition:-

On the bus to the BT Exhibition in Dublin, I was excited to see all the projects. When we arrived the first thing I noticed was just how big the place was. We walked to the back of the queue of hundreds, reaching off and twisting around. Ms. Mandal quickly found a way to get us past that and we were in the hall in no time at all. When we entered the hall, there were rows upon rows of stalls varying from “is playing music for your cows beneficial” to a “Recession Calculator” predicting recession by 2021. We met our fellow students participating from the school and saw the projects they’d worked on since the start of the year.

A few stands that really caught my interest were: A machine that can pollinate plants. This is extremely important due to the decline of bees in Ireland.  Another interesting stand was “Facebook. Is it watching you?”. They talked about very specific topics with their phones on close by and would see if ads related to the topics, they had talked about came up. The results were inconclusive but they reported it happening many times. Ask people if it has happened to them, it seems to be a common experience.

After looking at the stands, it was time for food so I swam through the sea of people to get to the food court. There were a dozen different food stalls each with a large queue, but the food was worth it.

Now there was only one section left to visit, the organisations handing out freebies. There were VR experiences and various games to play, as well as talks going on, but the queues were long. Time was ticking and free pens had to be collected. Over all it was a great day out where we got to see an array of science projects all providing food for thought.