BTYSE: Villiers’ first project to feature at BT exhibition since 2003

VILLIERS have a project featuring at the BT Young Scientist for the first time in approximately 20 years.

Transition year student Oyindamola Oluwadiya from Dublin is a boarding student at the school and is conducting her project on the theme of sleep and smartwatches.

The project called Orthosomnia (an unhealthy obsession with getting a perfect night's sleep) looks at sleep scores provided by sleeping apps on smartwatches or smartphones.

“It studies the relation between sleep scores and sleep and if sleep scores impact your quality of sleep. I picked it because I'm interested in sleep and studying human behaviour,” Oyindamola said.

According to Eoghan O’Brien, a teacher at the school, this is the first project the school has going up to Dublin since 2003.

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“I’ve been up to BT with other schools and I’ve seen that a lot of the students do very topical projects. We try to stick to things that are relevant,” Mr O'Brien said.

Louis Duffy, another teacher at the school, said he spoke to students last April, to get them thinking about a project for BT over the summer.

“I guess that was the catalyst to get these young people interested in doing science and science projects in the school. The school was very supportive of that, they basically just said yes, let’s go ahead and see how we get on,” Mr Duffy said.

“We were surprised when we came back to see that we had a total of nine entries to the competition. It’s a learning process to us and it’s great having Mr O’Brien on board now who has experience of the young scientist,” he added.