St. Louis Young Scientists
Young Scientist success for Gráinne
Gráinne Cunningham entered a project on 'The impact of the newly-introduced Human Papilloma Virus vaccination (HPV) scheme in our schools - a local study'.
This project explored attitudes of both parents and students to the vaccination scheme. Gráinne surveyed a large number of parents and students, to identify their views on the vaccination programme. She received great help from the HSE and local GPs.
Gráinne was highly commended for her work on the project and is the first winner in the BT Young Scientist and Technology Exhibition for the school in recent times.
Leanne and Niamh are BT Young Scientists
Our project was to attempt to get cycle lanes and secure bicycle shelter placed in Monaghan town. We thought we should do one that helped our town and the environment.
We thought it was a very good as it would help our town in many different ways like:
-Reducing traffic congestion
-Reducing C02 emissions
-Keeping people more active
-Attracting more tourists to the town
We started by contacting the Minister of Transport, Mr Noel Dempsey. We told him what we were doing and asked him if he could provide us with some information on the Dublinbike scheme, the National Cycle Policy and issues that occur when introducing bicycle lanes in small towns. We got two very helpful emails back, which provided us with a lot of information. We used this information to help create our surveys.
When we gave out the surveys in some of our local schools and the local library, we got a real insight into what people thought of the current facilities in our town and a lot if people seemed very interested in the idea.
We made contact with our Town Engineer and she provided us with some updated maps of Monaghan town. We marked the routes we thought where we thought were best for placing cycle lanes. We then chose twelve girls from our year group to help us with a traffic survey along these routes, to find out if they would be suitable for a cycle lane. We were correct in choosing these routes as they were quite busy and had wide roads, and therefore would be brilliant places for cycle lanes.
We transformed the information we collected into pie charts and put them in our folder and on our display boards.
We hope to have a meeting with our Town Council to try and organise the cycle lanes and the bicycle shelters for the people of Monaghan.
By Niamh Gallagher and Leanne McKenna
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