Child's play

NET RESULTS:How do you get kids to engage with hard science? Try having them predict the future then sit back, hold on to your hats and watch what they come up with.

That was the task required of secondary school students who entered a competition set by Crann, Trinity College Dublin's Centre for Research in Adaptive Nanostructures and Nanodevices. Nanotechnologies dwell in the realm of the very, very small - the molecular and the atomic.

Many astonishing predictions are already being made for how they will be used in the future, so letting students run with the idea is a natural.

The rewards for the students included a bevy of Wii gaming consoles and iPods. The rewards for the judges, which to my pleasure included me, was a most entertaining morning of looking at a wide variety of posters, videos, a website and an audio presentation.

Given the broad age bracket, ranging from 12 to 13-year-old junior students "only just starting science", as one entrant carefully explained, to senior students nearing the point of heading off to third-level education or to jobs, the level of polish and maturity varied quite a bit.

The winning projects though were all outstanding in different ways and many of them had us laughing out loud at a whimsical touch here or a turn of phrase there.

For example, one boy observed in his video about nanobots that everything seemed to be constantly getting smaller and smaller - including Angelina Jolie's waist.

All of us really enjoyed a couple of posters made by teams of girls who had clearly been taken by the notion that nanotechnology could be embedded in clothing and other items and could perhaps allow clothes to shed dirt or to change colour.

One team particularly liked the notion of buying a single bottle of nail varnish that could change colour (with knock-on bonus effects for the environment, they noted, as all those part-used bottles of gunky varnish in solitary colours would not end up in landfills). A project that really shone was St Columba's College's wildly creative and professional-looking website for a nano clinic in the year 2027, which would offer a wide range of services (even if some sounded a bit on the scary side).

This group of students had really done its homework and plenty of science - demonstrating some committed research on their part - to underline their vision of how routine nano technology might one day be used in healthcare.

I found the pictures of the extraordinarily young-looking doctors and consultants - who were suspiciously like secondary students dressed in white lab coats - highly entertaining.

I also loved Cathy's World, an audio submission from Niamh Broderick of Moate Community College: again, this was a fantastically creative project.

This was a narration about a girl with serious health problems named Cathy. Cathy's difficult daily routine - which includes her trying to brush and arrange her hair without disturbing the metal plate on her head and the metal tubes dangling from it - is transformed when her former science lecturer mother tells her about the possibility of getting new nano-clothes that can handle some of her healthcare tasks.

This project is clearly the work of a very gifted young writer - the detailed observation demonstrated a wordsmith relishing her task. Using the unusual format of a short story narrative to grapple with the competition's theme truly showed that there are many ways that students can get excited about science and many ways of teaching it that would reel in students from unexpected quarters.

I also really liked the "'brochure" for a nano-enhanced car from GAO Technologies (a new division of Subaru, according to the brochure, which also noted GAO's shares were doing very well on the market).

The student who produced this very detailed brochure, Lingfan Gao of St Columba's, imagines himself as the "entrepreneur and chief executive" of his 2027 company and somehow, I think he will end up both of those things in some company of the future.

The project of Gaelcholáiste Luimnigh student Diarmuid Ó Ceallacháin's also delighted, in which his younger brother was roped into serving as an illustration for several of his nano concepts.

There he was in a hat suspiciously like a bin lid on his head, carrying a bunch of pipes and odds and ends, to illustrate famed physics lecturer Richard Feynman's concept of nano robots. There was the little guy again, his face covered in ghastly spots, demonstrating an illness that might be cured by nanostructures. We awarded an extra iPod Shuffle to his little brother.

Thanks to all the students who entered and who provided all of us with such an enjoyable morning spent viewing your projects. Congratulations also to the winners who showed real creativity and flair in getting across the competition's theme.

I hope that this will become an annual event for TCD and Crann, as it is a wonderful way to get young minds grappling with topics that for many, may become a lifelong passion.

blog: www.techno-culture.com