A brother and sister from Donegal have separate projects on display at the exhibition this year.
Jamie Boyle prepared a study of how young people view cars and road safety, while his sister Gemma investigated how willow trees could be used as a biofiltration system to clean up waste water.
Jamie (14), a second-year student at Rosses Community School in Dungloe, wanted to assess how fellow students felt about driving and care on the road.
"It is about making people aware of the consequences of high speed driving, drink-driving and how to control it," Jamie says.
He went out on a checkpoint patrol with gardaí in Donegal and also conducted a survey among 150 fifth and sixth year students, looking for responses on a number of issues including the wearing of seatbelts, speeding and modified cars.
The checkpoint proved something of a revelation. The gardaí gave out five tickets within the first 10 minutes on the road, four for speeding and one for non-wearing of a seatbelt.
"What shocked me is there were two schools on the road they were on and it was lunchtime," says Jamie.
The drivers exceeded the 50km/h limit even though they could see there were students about.
"People just really need to get focused," he says. His survey showed 85 per cent of students didn't wear seatbelts because they weren't cool.
"Be cool and die or be uncool and stay alive," he says.
Gemma Boyle (16), a transition year student at the same community school, compared different water treatment methods to assess how well willow-tree biofiltration performed.
She found that the trees provided an excellent biological method for cleaning up waste water before discharge into streams and rivers. Now taking part in her third young scientist exhibition, Gemma looked at a willow tree biosystem, another biological system, the county council's own sewage treatment plant, using bottled water as a control.
The Organic Centre at Rossinver runs a willow tree system and provided samples for her study.
All samples were put through tests to assess ammonium, nitrate, acidity, bacterial content and biological oxygen demand.
The willow system easily outperformed all others, Gemma found, so much so that the water was close to drinking quality. The second bio system performed very badly and the council's own system was borderline in terms of regulations under the waste water directive, she found.
"They actually have water lilies and fish living in it [their final holding pond] so it must be pretty clean," she says.
