Belmayne student picks up second prize at national science awards

A 14-year-old student from Belmayne Educate Together Secondary School was recognised for her “innovative and timely” budgeting app, which aims to help people budget more efficiently, at the recent Teen Turn SciFest.

Anvi Lal was awarded second place in the Technology Software category at Teen Turn’s SciFest 2022, a national competition promoting Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM).

Lal created an app that can help people to budget more efficiently even if they have never budgeted before.

“My project for Scifest 2022 was building a user-friendly app that can help people with budgeting more efficiently even if they don’t have any past experience doing so,” said Lal said.

“Since last year I started learning business at school which included learning about household budgeting and budget planners.

“That’s when I realised how important and useful budgeting actually is and how I would not have known about all this if I didn’t pick business as one of my subjects.”

“Later during research I found that only 43% of people in America have an actual budget, and I believe it’s relatively similar in Ireland,” she continued.

“Through this app I am trying to inform and motivate more people to start budgeting and save money more efficiently.”

Anvi was a participant in Teen-Turn’s 12-week Project Squad.

Teen-Turn is an Irish non-profit organisation that provides teen girls the opportunity to gain hands-on STEM experience and the support to acquire qualifications and jobs, with a particular emphasis on underserved communities.

“Joining Teen-Turn helped me learn lots of amazing skills like ideation, design thinking, conducting surveys, research tips, presenting well and many more,” she said.

“This has been really helpful for me at school and I believe it will continue to be important in the future too. This also helped me to boost my confidence a lot.

“Presenting my projects is not as nerve-wrecking as before anymore.

“The weekly sessions with the mentors were really helpful, to share my thoughts and ideas on the project and get their suggestions on the same.

“I am really grateful to Teen-Turn for giving me such a great opportunity for helping me learn so many new things during the 12 weeks.”

Teen-Turn works with thousands of girls through after school activities, work placements, mentoring, and alumnae networking and career development programming from “Junior Cert to Job.”