Dublin Maker 2023

After a very positive experience at Dublin Maker 2022, we returned this year with our battery maker micro workshop. We brought with us a significant amount of experience from numerous other events that we attended since June 2022, which really benefited us in terms of crowd control and engagement levels this year. The festival changed location and date this year from Merrion Square to Inchicore and from June to September, but it actually got an even bigger crowd with over 10,000 people joining us.

Well done to Natalia, Ellen, Tanya, Blaithin and Keith for all their hard work sparking conversations with all ages. We directly engaged with over 1000 people during the day and got overwhelmingly positive feedback through our 5-point smiley face stand.

Huge thank you to the Sligo team for travelling all the way over to us to help the Trinity Team to engage with so many people. Collaboration is a very important part of the project so we are always delighted when we get the opportunity to work together. Thanks once again to the Trinity College Dublin Estate team for their ongoing support of our project through their access to the campus for collecting and dropping off our equipment. Thanks also to the Dublin Maker organisers for having us again and well done to all of them for putting together such a hugely successful festival.

Green Energy Resource

Huge thank you to Inigo Iribarren for his work on this new poster highlighting the ground breaking and historical contributions Ireland has made towards Green Energy over the past 100 years. It starts with the building of Ardnacrusha hydro power station in 1929, through to the hugely important pumped storage station at Turlough Hill and also includes more recent developments such as the hydrogen powered buses which are running in Dublin, and built in Co. Antrim. Printed versions of this poster are given to all schools after each workshop we run, and we have A1 and A0 size versions available.

We also handed out about 100 copies at the ISTA conference in Limerick, and another 100 at the Cork Carnival of Science. We have a few hundred left for upcoming events and if you haven’t got one yet come find us at the ChemEd-Ireland conference in Trinity in October for another chance to grab one.

Also, over the summer of 2023, while many of us enjoyed some well deserved time off, we embarked on a little project to translate the poster into Irish. Huge thanks to Niamh O’Shea at Trinity College Dublin (TCD) for translating the poster into Irish. We will now do a short print run of the Irish language version for anyone who wants it and once we run out of English language ones, we will print double sided versions with English on one side and Irish on the other. Both versions are freely available to download below as PDFs.

irish_a1Download
a1Download

Cork Carnival of Science 2023

Our PhD ambassadors are key to the success of our Current Chemistry Investigators (CCI) project. As well as helping everyone learn more about green energy, we also provide tangible role models for budding young scientists. Our team of 8 brilliant PhD researchers from Trinity College Dublin & Atlantic Technological University Sligo “sparked conversations” with about 2000 people at the Cork Carnival of Science again for the second year in a row. Thank you to all of our PhD ambassadors for their enthusiasm, professionalism and generosity with this time.

They are all inspiring Role Models – we had many children return to us for more chats! Thank you to Science Foundation Ireland for their support & to the Tánaiste Michael Martin TD for visiting our stand as well. Also, well done to our Royal Society of Chemistry undergrad summer student Dearbhla who undertook a detailed survey with participants about our activities and their interactions with our PhD ambassadors. The feedback we gathered was overwhelmingly positive and we look forward to publishing the results for everyone to see very soon.

 #ChemEd #chemistry #researchimpact #phdlife #ireland. #ChemEd #chemistry #researchimpact #phdlife #ireland

Leinster School Workshops

Our Trinity College Dublin team have been extremely busy this academic year, with over 30 schools visited all over Leinster and some in Munster too. Here are a collection of photos from some of our most recent school visits to CBA Naas in Co. Kildare, Kilkenny College, Temple Carrig School in Greystones, Co. Wicklow, St. Leo’s in Carlow, Coolmine Community College in west Dublin, Blackrock College in South Dublin and Clongowes College in Co. Kildare.

The CCI workshops provide hands on practical experience, real-world context for the curriculum and tangible role models. Thank you to all of our PhD researchers for giving up their time to inspire the next generation of scientists. Thank you also to all the teachers for partnering with us and inviting us into their school and lab. And finally, thank you to all the support staff in Trinity College Dublin and ATU Sligo for making these workshops possible every week.

Wrapping up for the Academic Year

Our first ever full academic year is now coming to an end with the last few workshops running through the month of May. It’s incredible that this time last year we were running our first pilot workshops in a handful of schools. From those tentative first steps we took on board all the advice provided to us by the great teachers involved in our pilots and improved every part of the workshop before we launched it officially in Sept 2022.

Since then, it has gone from strength to strength. We will be doing a wrap up post about the whole academic year soon, but for now here are some great pictures by the ATU Sligo team of their recent visit to Manorhamilton in lovely Leitrim. Well done to the PhD ambassadors from both institutions for running high quality workshops all over Ireland this year!

UCC Chemistry Collaboration

At the end of April we travelled down south for the first of many collaborations with the University College Cork (UCC) School of Chemistry for the UCC Access Programme. We ran our CCI secondary school workshop with a great bunch of Transition Year students in the science labs in UCC from multiple Cork schools. It was also great to have about a dozen UCC PhD researchers helping us and special thanks to the head of UCC chemistry Prof Anita Maguire for visiting the workshop.

Thanks to UCC staff members Dr Dave Otway and Will Daly for organizing the event and for inviting us down. We also followed up the UCC workshop with a trip to a local school in the afternoon to run another workshop with the Transition Year students of Regina Mundi College. So it was a very successful trip to Cork and it was great to catch up with so many people!

The featured picture is L-R: Dr Dave Otway (UCC), Prof Anita Maguire (UCC), Dr John O’Donoghue (TCD) and Dr Natalia Garcia Domenech (TCD).

ISTA Conference 2023

We made the trip to the Technological University of the Shannon (TUS) in Limerick on the 1st of April for the 2023 Irish Science Teachers Association (ISTA) conference. Teacher support and professional development is a large part of our long term plans for the CCI project. By encouraging, enabling and supporting teachers in their teaching of the chemistry of green energy, we are ensuring that our project will have a long term impact over many many years of students.

The CCI project had a promotional ad in the ISTA conference booklet and we had a stand in the main concourse where we talked about hydrogen fuel cells using our toy cars and we also handed out dozens of our “Green Energy Map of Ireland” posters. We hope these posters will stay on classroom and lab walls for many years, inspiring students as they learn.

It was great to see environmental advocate Duncan Stewart speaking at the conference, and it was also great to see so many battery electric cars charging outside. It really embodied the theme of the conference which was “sustainability”.

SFI Discover Partners Day

Huge thank you to Science Foundation Ireland (SFI) for inviting us to speak at their Discover Awards Partners day about our research into digital feedback methods. From the very beginning of our project we have priortised feedback and evaluation, in particular making it as assessible as possible to ensure that we are gathering an accurate picture of our project.

For our public engagement we have been using a simple 5-point Likert smiley face feedback method using tablets, while we have been using “interactive Digital Clickers” within our workshops to gather feedback from secondary schools students. We are currently in the process of analyzing the data and will have it publishing very soon for everyone to see. Keep an eye on our Research/Resources Section of this website over the next few months.

Spring has Sprung in the North West

The ATU Sligo team have been very busy through the month of March running school workshops all over the West and North West of Ireland. The team of PhD’s have visited Mayo, Galway, Leitrim and Donegal over the course of a few weeks.

Well done to everyone at ATU Sligo for their huge commitment and time to the CCI project. We really hope these rural schools enjoyed our visit to learn about the chemistry of energy storage, but more importantly learn about the current researched happening in our Higher Education Intuitions and about the career possibilities in STEM.

We had a Blast!!

A whopping 26 PhD and early career researchers from both Trinity College Dublin and the Atlantic Technological University Sligo, sparked conversations with over 800 primary students at our stand in the RDS for the ESB Science Blast! It was our biggest event to date in terms of the number of days, researchers and engagement.

Primary students from all over Leinster sat down with us for 5-10mins to talk about green energy, making batteries from coins and discussing hydrogen fuel cells with our researchers. We also took part as gaeilge on the Irish Language day where our Gaeilgeoir Niamh O’Shea from Trinity Chemistry engaged with gaelscoileanna as gaeilge all day!

The feedback we gathered from the event was also hugely positive with 78% of attendees to our stand rating it the highest possible rating on our 5-point “smiley scale”, and a further 16% rating it the second highest on our scale. The remaining 6% were a mixture of neutral and negative, which we will now learn from for future improvements.

A lot of thanks is due to many people. First of all to Rob Conway from the RDS for inviting us to take part. Rob is a Trinity Chemistry graduate so it was great to connect with him again. Thanks also to all of our leaders, which took charge of the stand each day; Susie Calvert, Ellen Fay, Lucy Fitzsimmons, and Inigo Iribarren. Finally, thanks to our ATU Sligo researchers who travelled all the way from Sligo to join their Trinity colleagues.