HISTORY The story of the Young Scientist Exhibition
The story of the Young Scientist Exhibition It is five decades since the first Young Scientist Exhibition took place and over that time the event has become renowned on the island of Ireland and internationally. Each January students from across Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland descend on the RDS, Dublin, to take part, while thousands more arrive to visit the stands and talk to their peers about the projects on display. The BT Young Scientist & Technology Exhibition reaches out to young people from all parts of Ireland, both north and south. It encourages them to take part and submit a project in the hopes of being one of the 550 that will finally make it onto the display floor at the RDS. These 550 will have been whittled down from an entry pool that now includes 2,000 projects submitted for consideration. It is a massive event to organise and stage, something BT has been doing since 2001. BT provides funding, resources and staff to run the event, also working in partnership with key supporting sponsors such as the Department of Education & Skills in the Republic of Ireland, Department of Education in Northern Ireland, Intel, RTE, Elan and Analog Devices. And yet it is the students who take part that are at the very heart of the Young Scientist Exhibition, they are the reason why the whole thing happens. The fact that the exhibition is so strongly student-focused is not by accident. Co-founders Rev Dr. Tom Burke and Dr. Tony Scott designed it to allow the students themselves to take centre stage and to make it their own. They do the work and present it, talking to judges, media and visitors with a remarkable degree of confidence, something which grows over the four days of the event, and which they will take away for the rest of their lives. There is also a less visible but vital contribution - that made by the teachers who help the students take raw ideas and turn them into projects. The teachers encourage and assist and help keep the students committed to finishing the project on time. They are both the inspiration and the guiding hand needed to keep the projects focused.
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BT Young Scientist & Technology Exhibition
The exhibition came into being almost by accident. Burke was a Carmelite priest and physics teacher, and Scott was a physicist staff member at University College Dublin who was working towards a PhD. The two had collaborated on various research projects into atmospheric physics and had published papers which came to the attention of the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology. Based in Socorro, New Mexico, the Institute invited the two Irish researchers across for a visit and to use a highly successful Irish-designed measuring instrument to help calibrate an instrument available to the Institute. This visit prompted another, one that would have unexpected but long-enduring consequences. Staff at the Institute told Burke and Scott that a local student was entering a project on rocketry in a “science fair” in Albuquerque, and that the student was anxious that the two Irish physicists see it. Curiosity about the project, but also about what a science fair involved, got them interested and so they found themselves at an empty parking lot at the Hilton Primary School in Socorro in the late summer of 1963. The student – Scott believes his name was Gary – was waiting there for them, to demonstrate his project. Scott took a picture of Burke and Gary and the student launched the rocket, before launching a second to show that the first was not a fluke. The Irishmen were suitably impressed and wished the student well as he prepared to compete in the science fair. This seemingly unimportant meeting proved to be the catalyst that in turn helped to bring about the first Young Scientist Exhibition about 18 months later. Scott completed his work with the Institutes’ researchers before going off to an atmospheric physics conference at University of California, Berkeley. Burke, however, wanted to learn more about these science fairs and so he travelled the 75 miles up to Albuquerque. It was a revelation. Here he saw projects from schools near and far, to attend an event that brought science out of the confines of the classroom and into the real world. The students learnt how the science they presented in their projects had relevance away from the text books and restricted curriculum, as they pursued their ideas and see where they led. “I wanted to see Irish Young Scientists bringing science outside the four walls of the classroom and showing that science was all around us,” said Burke of the experience.
