‘On Wednesday We Wear Pirate Hats’ The BT Young Scientist &Technology Exhibition and the state of younger people in Ireland

I was lucky enough to be one of the judges at the BT Young Scientist’s exhibition in Dublin in the first week of January. This gave me two rather different opportunities to see Irish school children. First, I got to meet the people who put in projects. These included the eventual winners, Ian O’Sullivan and Eimear Murphy from Cork, and about forty other people, all aged between 12 and 18, whose group projects, all entered into the Social and Behavioural Sciences section of the exhibition, I got to judge. (Every single project gets judged three times, independently, and those in the running for prizes are reviewed by further judges.)

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