Cork student's BT Young Scientist entry 'should be taken on board in curriculum design'
Shay Walsh, Managing Director BT Ireland and Minister for Education Norma Foley TD present the Runner Up Individual Award to Philippa McIntosh from Bandon Grammar School Co Cork for her project 'Beyond numbers: The textual challenge of Junior Cycle maths for Dyslexic Students' at the BT Young Scientist & Technology Exhibition 2024 in the RDS Dublin. Fennell Photography 2023
A Cork student was recognised at this year's BT Young Scientist Exhibition for her research on the challenges facing Junior Cycle maths students who have dyslexia.
Philippa McIntosh, a sixteen-year-old fourth-year student in Bandon Grammar School, the school attended by Cork’s last overall winner, Gregory Tarr in 2021, was the winner of the runner-up individual award at this year's competition.
“Philippa has conducted a very rigorous research project and has clearly shown that the phrasing of questions on the Junior Certificate higher level maths exams means that students who are actually good at maths but experience reading challenges, may be disadvantaged by over-complex wording,” said Dr. Sinéad Smyth, the head of the Social and Behavioural Individual Judging Panel.
“This important finding should be taken on board in curriculum design and assessment.”
Seán O’Sullivan, a fifth-year student in Limerick’s Coláiste Chiaráin won the overall prize in event with a project to devise a new solution to settling issues regarding authorship in the post Chat GPT era.
Dublin students, Abigail O’Brien Murray, Erica O’Brien Murray and Olivia O’Shea from Loreto Secondary School in Balbriggan won first prize for best group with the runner up spot going to Tralee sisters Ciara and Saoirse Murphy from the Presentation Secondary School.
The winners of the group prize in Balbriggan presented a project entitled ‘Lets Save the Common Ash’, a project which won the group runner-up award in 2023 and this year’s updated presentation went one better.
“These young scientists carried out several large and robust experiments, involving both lab and field testing,” said Dr. Richard O’Hanlon, a judge on the Group Biological and Ecological Panel. “Building on work they presented in the 2023 BTYSTE, they found that their treatments had the ability to reduce disease by more than 80%.
“This work is an important step towards developing a pathway to save our trees.”
The runner-up group project by the Murphy sisters was entitled ‘AID-CARE-TREAT (ACT), an immediate, accessible, technological aid to assist in medical emergencies, supported by a comprehensive repository of medical information’.
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