Students compete at Young Scientist Competition 2018

Today lydia Walton, Aoife Moloney and Ailbhe Dunlea are traveling to Dublin for the BT young scientist exhibition. For our project we are doing a comparative analysis, comparing an organic fertilizer we have manufactured using decomposing sea lettuce and a common artificial fertiliser, miracle gro. We are also displaying a synopsis of our results, which proved sea lettuce is not only more environmentally friendly it also performed better. 

We, three transition year students, Laura O’ Donovan, Leah McAree and Méabh O’ Donovan decided to enter the BT Young Scientist Competition at the start of the year. After lots of research and discussion we came up with the project ‘Protein Milk Vs. Full-Fat Milk: A comparative analysis of protein milk and full-fat milk on the muscular development of female teenage athletes.’ This project interested us for many reasons. Firstly, there is a huge price difference between protein milk and regular full-fat milk. We targeted the brand Avonmore for our experiment, as this supplier has the greatest price difference. There is a €1.04 difference between Avonmores protein milk and their full-fat milk, which is appalling. Secondly we believe that protein milk is a highly endorsed product. On the protein milk carton there are images of Ireland’s top GAA players, indoctrinating people to believe that if they buy and consume this milk they will become these highly valued sports players. We believe that protein milk may also be a marketing ploy for companies to increase profits. To begin our project we recruited a sample of participants. Half of our sample went on protein milk and the other half went on full-fat milk The participants conducted a six-week plan where they drank 500ml of their specified milk after they completed a designated workout three times a week. Prior to the experiment we conducted fitness tests and physical measurements of each participant. At the end of the project these same examinations were conducted again. From our experiment, we concluded that protein milk is not worth the expensive price when it has essentially the exact same effect on physical measurements and fitness levels