Category Archives: Science

Success for Ava and Nicole at BT Young Scientist and Technology Exhibition

Massive congrats to Ava & Nicole who took home 1st prize in the Intermediate Social and Behavioural category! A super achievement by the girls whose project titled “Are our Bus Routes Effective” sparked great interest from Political parties, county councils and environmental agencies over the past few days. Well done ladies!!!👏🎊🥳
The girls also took home a special award – The HEAnet award, which is awarded to “the project which shows the most practical and innovative use of network technology in performing background research for the project and/or collaborating with other team members, teachers etc”
A superb achievement!
The girls worked tirelessly from September on their project, in which they studied school bus routes, analysing them in detail to ascertain the efficiency of the routes in terms of carbon emissions, time and distance. Amazingly, they found that by making some changes to the routes at our school, significant time could be saved, empty seats could be almost eliminated and the number of buses needed to deliver the service could be reduced. Perhaps most significantly, the girls found that by making these changes to the school routes around Ballinamore CS, the equivalent of 8 personal flights from Dublin to Adelaide could be saved in carbon emissions! Great work girls!

Science Week

Science Week is in full swing here at BCS this week with students enjoying a range of activities within the world of science! Bradley Chiropractors gave an excellent and informative talk to our 2nd years on posture, how to sit correctly & carry their school bags.
1st years worked on electronic kits and made circuits to allow a light to turn on, a spinner & a music chime to work. Well done to our future Engineers! 👩‍🔬👨‍🔬
Other activities included skittle chromatography, dancing raisins, hairdryer ping ponging, atomic chemistry, yeast balloon respiration and exploring water filtration systems and DNA extraction, along with heart dissections.

Molly is Highly Commended at BTYSTE

Well done to TY student Molly Prior whose project “A statistical analysis on the effect of Rural Decline on People’s Well-being was highly commended at  the recent BT Young Scientist Exhibition at the RDS in Dublin. Molly hard work over the previous few months together with her highly effective communication style impressed the judges greatly. Well done Molly.

Hairy Halloween Pumpkins

Students in Ms Colum’s Science Class carved pumpkins last week and noticed a couple of days later that furry white and black growths had begun growing inside the pumpkins. As, scientists, the first year students looked a bit closer at the growths under the microscope where they could identify parts of the fungus such as stolons, sporangiophores and spores. As students want to be as sustainable as possible, the pumpkins were fed to the birds in our wildlife area at the back of the school.

Climate Action Day

For Climate Action Day, students enjoyed playing a climate change card game, where they had to match climate change terminology with the correct sentence. This helped students to develop their literacy skills and made them aware of the part we all have to play in combating climate change. Second year students also engaged with the repair element of our 4R Action day for climate change by repairing their books so they can be recycled.