On Friday 15th May, eighteen students from St. Mary’s Secondary School, Our Lady’s College Greenhills and Coláiste na hInse Secondary School attended the Prize-giving Ceremony hosted at The Mill Enterprise Hub.
Drogheda Young Innovators is a competition to reward and promote innovation amongst secondary school students in Drogheda. This is the second year of the awards which focus on all aspects of Innovation. The awards were established by serial entrepreneur Geoff Fitzpatrick, in partnership with The Mill.
Applications from individuals and groups were judged in three categories:
- Science and Technology ; a technical or scientific innovation
- Enterprise / Business ; a new business idea
- Social Enterprise ; a non-profit innovation that will change our society
Two individual and four group winners were chosen, with an overall winner, Elle Loughran from Our Lady’s College, receiving a cash prize of €300 for her Science project ‘Novel graphene functionalization to detect attraction’.
The other winners include:
- Niamh Kelly (Our Lady’s College) – Social Enterprise Individual Winner with the project “An investigation of mathematical concepts and connections in a garden”;
- Orla Molloy and Neasa Early (Our Lady’s College) – Science Group Winners with their project on “Mathematical analysis of number patterns in winning draws in the national lottery”;
- Lucy Murray, Aoife Mc Auley, Sean Mortalo and Alanna Hogan (Coláiste na hInse) – Business Group Winners with their project “Dear Santa”.
- Ben Penthony, Kevin Doyle, Dylan O’Rourke and Thomas Monk (St. Mary’s) – Business Group Winners with their project “The Chopping Board Co”.
- Leighton Egan, Ben Mooney, Killian Kierans, Darragh Beirth, Dean Gunnery, and Lee Mc Guiness (Coláiste na hInse) – Social Enterprise Group Winners with their project “Cosy Capall”.
Last year’s winner, Anna McEvoy from Our Lady’s College, Greenhills, was in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, picking up a major award in the biggest school’s science competition in the world. 17-year-old Anna was awarded both a second place award in the Plant Sciences category as well as a Monsanto Award for Innovation in Plant Science First Award at the annual Intel International Science and Engineering Fair (Intel ISEF), which was attended by approximately 1,700 young scientists selected from 422 affiliate fairs in more than 75 countries.
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