6th Class Room 10: Science Blast / BT Primary Science fair 2022

Here in Room 10 we have been REALLY busy over the past few weeks. Last November we applied to both the ESB Science Blast and the BT Primary Science fair in the hopes of maybe getting accepted into one of them. Luckily for us - we were accepted into both with our class project:
"Breaks V Beats: Which  has the greatest impact on our Concentration?"

To carry out our investigation we firstly revised the scientific method. We then set about planning out investigation. 
We decided to use a  3   minute typing task as our base test for the investigation. After each activity, we repeated the test to see if our word count increased or decreased after it.
For the "Breaks" section, we chose 3 activities:
1. A 15 minute Movement Break
2. 5 Minute Mindfulness Colouring
3. 5 Minute Meditation

For the "Beats" section we chose:
1. Rock Music (Eye of the Tiger)
2. Classical Music (Bach's  Orchestral Suite No.3)
3. Our favourite song

Once we had recorded our findings, it was then onto the stastics! We used a variety of maths strategies to work out our percentage increases/decreases. We then put these figures into various pie & bar charts.

We worked in our pods & as a whole  class in order to put our project together. We were so surprised by our findings! 
Taking breaks saw a 20.7% improvement in our concentration whilst listening to music say a 22.2% increase. When we looked as to whether gender effected our results,we were suprised to find that girls found mindfulness to be most effective, whilst boys found meditation to be most effective. We concluded that listening to music had a greater impact on our concentration - with listening to our favourite song seeing the largest increase of 33.1%!
Judging:
For the BT Primary Science Fair, We had our judging on Wednesday the 30th of March . our judge for this was  Seán Corish. He was also very impressed with our project and praised us for our work. There are no prizes for the Primary Science Fair, this event is all about participation and promoting science and technology.
 Our  ESB   Science Blast judging took place the same week. Normally, the ESB Science Blast takes place in the RDS in Dublin, but this year, it was a virtual event. We had the first part of it on Tuesday the 29th of March. Our judge was Dr. John O'Shea. We presented our project to him and then he gave us his feedback on Friday the 1st of April. He was VERY impressed with our work and in particular, with our  work on statistics! We were awarded with an iPad and a glass "Science Blast" Trophy. Today in class, Ms. Nic Cumhaill presented us with our certificates and then presented us with our trophy!

Take a look at the photos of our work from the last few weeks! I think it's fair to say that we have lots of budding scientists here in Room 10! 

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