Local schools well represented at 2025 BT Young Scientist and Technology Exhibition

County Roscommon and surrounding areas will be well represented at this year’s upcoming BT Young Scientist and Technology Exhibition (BTYSTE) being held in the RDS Dublin from Wednesday, January 8th to Saturday, January 11th.

In total 20 individuals and groups will represent the county in different categories ranging from Health and Wellbeing to Social and Behavioural Sciences and will be competing against 520 other projects from the island of Ireland.

One project that has already gained a high profile comes from a Sixth Year student at Glenamaddy Community School.

Michaela Gillooly from Williamstown has called hr project "Own your cycle, own your game", an investigation into the negative stigma around females speaking out about their periods and the effects their menstrual cycle has on their athletic performance.

Roscommon Community College will have five representatives with topics including ‘Words Without Walls: Exploring The Emotional Impact Of Language Barriers On Students’ and ‘The effect of music on adolescent behaviour’.

Scoil Mhuire, Strokestown has four varied entries. A group project called ‘A mixed method observational study of our local bird population and their feeding behaviour’ will focus on a familiar topic, while the individual entry of ‘Apollo” - A novel network anomaly detection system using AI’ under the Technology category is a modern entry researching the rapidly expanding field of AI.

Coláiste Chiaráin also has strong representation with two entries, and has a sports orientated entry entitled ‘Gumshields: Fit or miss?’.

Interestingly the island Gaelscoil Coláiste Ghobnait (Inis Oírr) has an individual Roscommon entry and in keeping with the school’s Gaelscoil mantra will be entered in Irish and is entitled ‘Feamainn - an leasachán foirfe é’ or ‘Seaweed – is it the perfect fertiliser’.

Athlone Community College, Coláiste Mhuire, Dunmore Community School, Elphin Community College, Our Lady’s Bower and Scoil Muire gan Smal all have a sole entry.

Elphin Community College has a topical entry under the Biological and Ecological category on ‘The Study of Air Quality Using Leaf Yeast in Roscommon’, while Our Lady’s Bower have entered under the Technology category with their project called ‘The Mould Busters’.

For Michaela Gillooly from Glenamaddy Community School, playing for Creggs RFC and noting that the days she was on her period were the same days she felt like she underperformed in a match or training, sparked her interest in the topic.

“I also help coach two underage girls’ rugby teams and get to see first-hand how embarrassed and awkward girls feel when discussing their periods with their coaches,” she told the Roscommon Herald.

“Growing up playing sports, I always felt like the management teams were male dominated making it harder for a girl to talk about her menstrual health,” she said.

During her research or the project she found that 60% of girls between the ages of 16-18 quit sport and the leading cause of that was due to their periods and awkwardness around it. “I conducted fitness testing on 42 female students in my school population. I had them do four fitness tests over the course of four weeks and I was able to determine that their periods were in fact affecting their athletic performance.” She competed in the TUS Athlone regional SciFest competition in April of 2024 and placed 1st in the Senior life science category and won the "Best Project" award. As she had won the overall competition, she automatically qualified for the SciFest national final in late November 2024.

“I had to expand on my project, so I chose to conduct further fitness testing on 16 members of the Tuam/Cortoon U-16 LGFA team. This time, I ran six fitness tests on them for a six week period. Overall like the students, I discovered the athletes' periods also negatively affected their athletic performance,” she said.

On November 29th she competed in the SciFest national final held in the Marino Institute of Education in Dublin and won the "STEM Outreach" award.

Michaela, daughter of Joe and Martina Gillooly, says there is, “no simple solution here, if there was we'd already have it. Over the summer I made period positive poster with an organisation called HerMoves. I would love to see these posters in all public places, bus stops, airports, shops you name it and of course in every sports club and primary, secondary school and college, even on bathroom stalls. Poster like these could be really beneficial in keeping girls in sport. I'm also working on getting a grant for all female sports clubs so they can use it to get period products so it can reduce the awkwardness of getting your period while playing sport because supplies are already there and they are free.” She is also planning on building an app for players and coaches to minimise injuries and improve athletes results when performing.