THE Southside was well represented at the RDS last week where the annual BT Young Scientist and Technology Exhibition brought some of Ireland’s most promising students together under one roof.
The exhibition, which opened to the public last Thursday for three days, attracted the highest number of entries yet in the nearly 50 years it has been held.
The more than 550 projects on display covered the four main categories of biological and ecological sciences, chemical, physical and mathematical sciences, social and behavioural sciences, and technology.
There was a 24 per cent increase in entries in the technology category over the 2012 contest alone.
With the show approaching its 50th anniversary next year the number of visitors to the RDS has also steadily increased. Over 45,000 were expected to walk through the doors this year, a huge increase on the 34,000 who arrived last year.
The Southside has always been well represented at the exhibition and this year has been no exception.
There were entries from well known schools such as Holy Child Secondary School, Killiney and St Michael’s College, Ballsbridge among many others that were hoping to emulate the amazing success enjoyed by another Southside school, that of CBS Synge Street in Dublin 8, which has produced a string of winners in recent years.
Last year’s winning entry was from the school in the guise of Eric Doyle and Mark Kelly who won the top prize with their project that looked at planetary motion and how satellites can stay on the right flight path when in space.
In 2007 Abdusalam Abubakar was declared the winner while just three years earlier, in 2004, Ronan Larkin walked away with the biggest prize in the world of the young scientist.
As well as the 550 student projects on display, another four exhibition halls were filled with science and technology based exhibits and entertainment.
The first competition was held in 1965 in the Round Room of the Mansion House in Dublin and attracted 230 entries.
The first ever winner, John Monaghan, has recently retired as Chief Executive Officer of Avigen, a US Biotech company. The success of the first year necessitated the move to the much larger venue of the RDS for year two where it has remained ever since.
In recent years the number of entries has increased dramatically but just over 550 projects go through to compete in the RDS.
Now that it attracts over 40,000 people each year the exhibition has become one of the largest events of its kind in Europe.