Westmeath secondary school students are expected to be amongst the many students entering SciFest this year. This one day festival of science is held in Institutes of Technology around the country and it is here that local secondary school students ranging from first to sixth years demonstrate their projects and participate in a competition.
Due to the success of the BT Young Scientist & Technology Exhibition, SciFest has been created to cater for the excess demand and provides an additional forum for students who wish to exhibit their work and experience the excitement of sharing their findings with other like-minded students. SciFest has the additional advantage that it is locally based which makes it more accessible to students and allows them to view the facilities and courses available in their local Institute of Technology. Students from Athlone Community College; Marist College, Athlone; Moate Community School; Colaiste Mhuire, Mullingar; Our Lady's Bower, Athlone; St Aloysius College, Athlone; and St Joseph's College, Athlone represented the county last year at SciFest 2008 which took place in Athlone Institute of Technology. Some 1,612 students exhibited over 680 projects in nine Institutes of Technology – Athlone, Carlow, Cork, Dublin, Limerick, Sligo, Tallaght, Tipperary and Waterford – in SciFest 2008.
An online dimension has been added to this year’s competition, following a successful pilot last year of Project Blogger. Students can create their own science blogs to keep a record of their SciFest entry and share their experiences in science with classmates from their own school and from other schools around Ireland. The blog makes it easy for students to store their SciFest project images, ideas, graphs, video files, etc, as part of their online science diary and then use the blog as part of their exhibition at the SciFest event.
For further information and for entry forms ahead of the deadline of March 13 visit www.scifest.ie Projects are not due for submission until the end of April.
