SUCCESS FOR COUNTY MONAGHAN SCHOOLS AT BT YOUNG SCIENTIST AWARDS

Students from Largy College in Clones and Ballybay Community College were conferred with Special Awards at the 2024 BT Young Scientist and Technology Exhibition. Largy College students Sadhbh Bonner and Denisa Horvat won the Irish Science Teachers Association Award in the Chemical, Physical & Mathematical Sciences for their project How to Improve the Teaching of Astronomy. Ballybay Community College students Chloe Sullivan, Charlotte Smith, Katie Duffy won the Tackle Your Feelings Award for their project “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but my mind can also hurt me”, which studied the effects of injury on the mental wellbeing of athletes.

The Ballybay project was also highly commended in the Health and Wellbeing Section of the awards. The overall winner of the competition was Seán O’Sullivan, aged 17, a 5th year student from Coláiste Chiaráin in Limerick for his project, VerifyMe: A new approach to authorship attribution in the post-ChatGPT era. Speaking at the awards ceremony Minister for Education Norma Foley TD said “Meeting students exhibiting projects this week and witnessing the innovation, creativity and attention to detail which they have applied to their research has been a great….