On Wednesday March 6th we went to the ESB Science Blast in the RDS Dublin. We had an early start leaving the school at 6:50. We sang songs on the bus journey up that we had been learning with Mrs Maher in Music. When we got there we set up our stand for display. The teachers had done up a rota where we were put in four groups and we would take turns manning the stand.
Our project was "What is GRAVITY?" When the judges came to our stand we spoke about air resistance first and the feather and the ball - if they were in an air vacuumed box they would fall at the exact same time. Next we explained about the balloon with the coin in it and a balloon with no coin - if we threw them up and hit the balloons left, the balloon with the coin would jump in different directions but the balloon with no coin would move normally. We talked about suction - if we had a glass half full of water and put a piece of cardboard on the top it it, pushed it down super hard for 10 seconds, then turned it upside down from there, the cardboard would stay on. We spoke about Issac Newton and how the apple dropped on his head and how this inspired him to think about gravity. The judges were very nice.
After the judging we went to the XXFactor where we learned about famous women scientists. We had lots of free time where we looked around and collected free stuff! We had great fun in Explorium on "The Bed of Nails" (check out our photos below) and we visited other schools stands that had some very interesting topics such as "can texting effect your driving" and "can vegetables power a small Christmas tree".. In the afternoon we went to Gastronout Extreme where they demonstrated some gross but cool experiments and a few explosions and fire! We learned that the colour of pink marshmallows comes from a red cochineal beetle....yuck!
Just before we left the judges came around to us and gave us some great feedback on our project. They said they liked that we brought the iPad to show our videos and experiments but would have liked to see it done on the day with a fan. We got a cool surprise on the way home when we stopped off at Coynes Cross for a Burger King! Thanks teachers for a great day out.
by Faye, Áine, Casey and David.
