Junior Science Fair Awards
From Tuesday 29th January to Friday 1st February, the Clongowes Wood College Science Department hosted our first ever Science Week. A high point of the event took place on Thursday, 31st with the Second Annual Junior Science Fair in collaboration with SciFest@School, where a second-level school hosts their own in-house SciFest STEM fair. The SAT building was adorned with SciFest balloons and student posters and Dr Aishling Quine put in a huge amount of work to ensure that the work of the past five months was displayed to best advantage.
Along with the Science teachers and School Captain and Vice Captains, Scifest Founder Mr Sheila Porter was joined by parent Dr Sumi Dunne and Headmaster Mr Chris Lumb in the judging of 51 STEM projects on Thursday evening. In line with best practice, each students was interviewed as well as presenting their written work and poster a number of times to a number of judges.
From NFL draft statistics to air pollution in the study and recreational areas in Clongowes by way of links between language and intelligence, if size matters in rugby, what affects the bounce of a tennis ball, marine pollution, Downs Syndrome, whether music affects taste perception – the questions asked were both novel and creative and the judges were amazed with the work of our young Elements’ boys.
The 2019 Overall Junior Scientist of the Year went to Aodhán Mc Guinness and the Captain’s Choice Award was won by Rian O’Kelly. The second award was chosen by our School Captain Hugo O’Donnell with the support of his vice captains Fred Sargaison and Charlie Kelly representing the Student Voice in prize giving. Two runners up – Jack Shannon and Matthew Kelly – were also awarded trophies and ten projects were rosette commended. The award winners will be brought to other Science Fairs: SciFest@College and the BT Young Scientist.
The full list of award winners is here and their projects may be viewed here.
