Health in sport is the focus of many of the students taking part in this year's BT Young Scientist Technology Exhibition, writes CLAIRE O'CONNELL
HOW MUCH do you know about concussion? Or the amount of sugar you are eating? And could your grip strength tell you how much is left in your personal battery of energy?
Those are just some of the questions that students have been asking for this year’s BT Young Scientist Technology Exhibition, which takes place this week in Dublin. Now in its 48th year, the exhibition will showcase 550 projects from more than 350 schools.
Last year’s winner, Alexander Amini from Castleknock College, went on to scoop first prize at the European Union Contest for Young Scientists for his work using computer technology to analyse a person’s tennis swing.
Many of the participants in this year’s exhibition at the RDS have also put their focus on sport and health.
Concussion was on the minds of Lorcan O’Donnell, Oisín Healy and David Healy, fourth-year students from Ardscoil Uí Urmoltaigh in Bandon, who play rugby. “In the past few years concussion has been a pretty topical issue in rugby, but there hadn’t been much awareness placed on it,” says O’Donnell, who describes how the students found out about the need to rest players properly after a blow to the head causes concussion symptoms.
Their survey of 300 people in Cork city found that the vast majority of respondents were not aware of the dangers of concussion, nor what to do if it happened to someone.
The students also surveyed 60 athletes in rugby, Gaelic football and karate, and as a way to highlight the problem, the young scientists plan to figure out the force of a blow to the head in rugby and compare it to being hit on the head with a weight.
And from sore heads to hurting legs: Gaelic football players Darryl Connell and Clodagh O’Callaghan, from Schull Community College, decided to investigate a particular type of injury.
“We noticed there were a lot of hamstring injuries and we thought it could have been connected to the flexibility of the hamstrings,” explains Connell.
The students talked to researchers at the University of Limerick and set about designing their project. They measured hamstring flexibility in 160 volunteers and asked about previous injuries, then waded through the data to compare males and females, players and non-players and younger and older players. They found that the Gaelic football players were less flexible and they had more injuries than non-players.
“There was also a massive difference between the flexibility in each leg – most of the time it was the kicking leg that was the most flexible,” says Connell, who adds that both he and O’Callaghan are now more aware of the need to warm up before training and matches and to keep muscles flexible.
Could what you eat also help boost your performance in sport? Robert Tully, Seán Hayes and Cormac de Faoite, all fourth-year students in Gormanston College in Meath, decided to find out.
“We are each interested in different types of sports – athletics, hurling and rugby – and we knew that each of the sports demanded something different, but we are always told to eat the same types of foods,” explains Tully.
So they studied how the body absorbs food and they set up an experiment where 15 volunteers went on a particular diet (high in protein, carbohydrates or fats) for two weeks.
By putting the volunteers through their paces in a battery of fitness tests before and after the special diets, the young scientists saw that what the volunteers ate affected their physical performance in different ways.
Of course, keeping your diet healthy overall is important too – and that means not overdoing it on refined sugars. But how much sugar do we consume?
It’s a question that occurred to Ross O’Doherty, James O’Connor and Damien O’Loughlin, all first-year students at Meánscoil Na mBráithre in Clare. They asked 35 fellow students to write down what they ate and drank for a day and they also carried out interviews.
“We found that most people were over the average daily recommended amount of sugar,” says O’Doherty. “A lot of them didn’t realise it.”
The project has increased awareness in their year about sugar and the three young scientists themselves have cut back on their intake.
Meanwhile, wouldn’t it be handy if you could measure your own energy levels by simply testing your grip strength? That’s what Lorcan Brophy, a first-year student at Willow Park School in Co Dublin has been investigating.
“Sometimes you would feel tired and you don’t want to go to the gym or play rugby,” he says. “It would be great to know when you would get stuff done and what you would be able to do.”
Brophy has been working with the school’s cross-country team to measure their grip strength and assess how energetic they felt to see if there’s a relationship.
And from real sport to virtual: how do video games affect our bodies? A study by Dylan Carlos, Gavin Callaghan and John Caulfield, transition-year students from Castlerea Community School, found that when volunteers played a computer game for five minutes, their physical fitness seemed to influence how their bodies reacted.
“In healthy, fit people, the heart rate started off at a healthy level and spiked up about 10 or 15 beats per minute and had normalised by the end again,” explains Carlos. But he notes that in people who weren’t as fit, they saw the opposite effect: the heart rate first dipped and then came back up.
The BT Young Scientist Technology Exhibition at the RDS, Ballsbridge, Dublin, is open 9.30am-5.30pm on Thursday to Saturday. Tickets can be bought at the door, €12 for an adult, €6 for concession/student and €25 for a family of two adults and up to three children. For details, see btyoungscientist.com or tel: 1800-924362 or from Northern Ireland 0800-917-1297.
