Students choose the most unusual subjects when putting together projects for the annual Esat Young Scientist and Technology Exhibition. Two students from Loreto College, St Stephen's Green, Dublin, provide a case in point with their examination of the behaviour and life cycle of the woodlouse.
Laura McKenna and Aoife Brennan delved into the soil to seek out these small grey bugs that most people can't stand the sight of and which are members of the phylum Arthropoda. The teacher who guided their work is Ms Sheila Porter, a veteran of the exhibition who has won the coveted top teacher award at the RDS for her efforts.
We might know woodlice as the scurrying bugs who dash out from under rocks and rotting wood if disturbed. They are in fact the only fully terrestrial crustaceans and are directly related to more familiar aquatic Arthropoda including crabs, lobsters and prawns.
Like their water-loving relations, woodlice also have gills, as the two students point out in their study.
The project research was broken into three key elements. The first involved a detailed study of the external structure of the woodlouse and an examination of its life cycle from egg to adult.
The students' next goal was to devise novel experiments to investigate the automatic responses to external stimuli such as light and water. They did this without harming the insects.
The third part of the research involved studying the distribution and population size of the common garden woodlouse in various locations.
A second Loreto project from St Stephen's Green involved Ceire Proctor and Sarah O'Sullivan, who completed a study of sunglasses and how they affect our eyesight. The project began with a question about whether coloured lenses disturb or impair vision and this expanded into a study of how the eye works.
They conducted experiments to assess how a standard eye test might be disturbed if the subject was wearing sunglasses. The students also looked at how the glasses might affect the ability to distinguish colour.
They tested a theory about coloured lenses inducing temporary colour blindness and conjectured about whether this might affect driving. They also used a spectrometer to measure the wavelengths of light that passed through sunglass lenses.