Community School picks up eight awards at SciFest

Tallaght Community School picked up eight awards at SciFest in TU Dublin Tallaght on Thursday, with one student potentially bound for the international stage.

TCS in Balrothery scooped up eight of the 20 awards available at the event in the local college campus, with 19 pupils from the school taking part to display 10 different projects, mentored by three teachers.

SciFest is one of the largest STEM fair programmes in Ireland and has been held for 20 years, with the inaugural one taking place in Tallaght.

One of the projects by fourth year student Stacey Oyelakin titled ‘Straight Talk: School life with scoliosis and the promise of AI’ won the Boston Scientific Medical Devices Award.

Teacher Kate O’Gorman noted that Stacey has scoliosis and described her work as a “passion project.”

“She has developed an app whereby the idea of the app is that parents would be able to take a photograph of their children’s back, the app measures the angle tilt of the shoulders and the changes in angle tilt over time.

“You’re waiting for quite a long time in between appointments and things like that, when you go to the doctors, it could be up to six months in between seeing a doctor and seeing them again.

“During puberty, scoliosis can develop very rapidly – there can be changes to the Cobb angle – and for Stacey herself, this was a massive anxiety.”

The Cobb angle is a widely used measurement to understand the severity of a scoliosis curve.

The intention of the app is that parents can monitor these changes at home and can report these to a doctor, which could potentially result in a move up the waiting list.

Stacey is now being considered to compete in Los Angeles, USA as a result of her work.

TCS has had success in recent years with science fairs – past pupils Aimee and Ashlee Keogh starred at the Young Scientist exhibitions, scooped up awards there and earned themselves the opportunity to showcase their work at EXPO 2025 in Osaka, Japan.

“We’ve been very successful in the Young Scientist, but Ashlee and Aimee were the most successful we have ever been and that has really put a little fire under everybody’s science ambitions.”

Other TCS award winners at SciFest include third-year students Holly Dooley and Lauren Kidney for their project on the effectiveness of suncream (Overall Physics Award), second-years Iga Bogdanska and Victoria Dawidczyk for their work on identifying birds by sound in order to protect them at schools (Irish Science Teachers’ Association Award) and third-years Anastasiia Pysarenko and Natalia Mularska for their study of hydroponic broad beans as a protein source for space missions (Discovery Space Award).

Fiona Doyle and Laoise Higgins have been part of the science success at the school in recent years alongside Kate.

The well-nurtured culture of science in the local school has borne fruits that O’Gorman hopes will continue to flourish over the years.

“It’s my privilege just to sit and watch these wonderful things. I saw a poster that said ‘I’ve always dreamt of meeting my favourite scientists, but I get to teach mine’ or something like that.

“It’s like that exact thing – I get to have my favourite scientists in my classroom. They’re really wonderful.”