MyScience.ie

SciFest is taking place across the country, with 2,000 students exhibiting their projects over the next fortnight at 14 Institutes of Technology nationwide. The programme aims to encourage the pursuit of science through an investigative approach to learning and to provide an opportunity for students to display their scientific discoveries.

Leah Kelly and Zainab Raouf, Loreto College Foxrock, are pictured demonstrating their project which investigates whether mobile phones can be charged using solar energy at DIT Kevin Street as part of SciFest last Thursday.  203 local students took part in the event at DIT with 97 projects on display in total.
 
Athlone, Blanchardstown, Dublin, Dundalk, Carlow, Cork, Galway/Mayo, Letterkenny, Limerick, Sligo, Tallaght, Tipperary, Waterford, and Tralee Institutes of Technology are all participating in this year’s SciFest with nearly 900 projects entered in total in 2009, compared to 680 projects in 2008.
  
Now in its third year, SciFest is jointly funded by Intel and Discover Scinece and Engineering and is supported by a number of other partners. The project thus creates a valuable link between the second and third level education sectors as well as between education and industry. Students compete for a number of awards including; Intel Best Project Award, Abbott Runner-up Best Project Award, BT Best Communicator Award, Discover Sensors Award.
  
Following a successful pilot in 2008, an online element was added to this year’s exhibition, with Project Blogger. This allowed students to create individual blogs to keep a record of their SciFest entries and share their experiments with participating students from around the country. Such blogs then formed part of students’ exhibitions at the SciFest events, tracking the project’s path from conception to completion by uploading images, ideas, graphs and video files to the web.