Twins Aimee and Ashlee Keogh (18), sixth year pupils at Tallaght Community School in Co Dublin, are clearly dab hand scientists as they engineered some spectacular chemistry at the launch of the 2025 BT Young Scientist & Technology Exhibition. Yet their main specialisation is helping to modernise study habits among their peers.
Over two years, they have investigated how people study with particular focus on the “intention-action gap”, which affects pupils in different ways and largely depends on personality/brain type. It has culminated in them generating their “Mind the Gap” app for second level students.
“It trains students to be intrinsically motivated,” said Aimee. Their process is supported by “personalised study resources based on how your brain operates”.
This is the third time they have entered the annual contest at the RDS and they will join hundreds of their peers from 225 schools displaying 550 projects. A judging panel of 85 experts from the world of Stem (science, technology, engineering, maths) and business choose the 200-plus prize winners.
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Dr Peter Taylor, a former pupil at St Kilian’s Community School, Bray, won the 2001 contest with classmates Shane Browne and Michael O’Toole for work on polygons, described as an “elegant and sophisticated study in formal mathematics”. Now a mathematician based in UCD who specialises in black hole physics, he has been a judge for more than 10 years.
He described the judging process as going into a bubble for a few very long days. “We encounter so many amazing students. The quality and level of the projects astounds me every single year. I absolutely love doing it.”
This generation of students seem to be very competent computer coders, he added, and with artificial intelligence (AI), coding is only going to get easier, “so you can actually ask AI now to code for you. So we’re probably going to see even more technology projects over the coming years doing really well as those barriers to entry start to fall.”
Co-founder Dr Tony Scott acknowledged the remarkable progress of science since the 1960s. “In the early days, the students got their information in the school library, which is probably two books. Now, the libraries of the world are on their PCs, and they can do everything they want.”
He is particularly impressed by how they keep up to date with developments in science and apply that in determining how ideas and concepts can be made useful, which frequently makes for “incredible projects”.
On misinformation disputing science and current controversy around AI, Dr Scott said: “It’s time to get the science [the facts] out from the fiction ... You can become very scared when you read about AI, what that might be doing to control you, but there’s another side to all of this. I think it’s up to these young people to get involved with the science and see how it’s applied; AI can improve science for the benefit of everybody.”
Already, the era of AI has arrived, said BT Ireland managing director Shay Walsh. Judges are adept at whittling down over 2,000 projects to 550 featuring in the RDS and filtering out AI-generated projects.
The more positive aspect was the curiosity students have in AI-generated content from the perspective of understanding the difference between organically generated content and AI-generated content – and how they use it for good, he said.
The 61st exhibition is a significant milestone for BT Ireland as it marks 25 years as custodian and organiser of the event.
‘’The exhibition has become a launch pad for some of the brightest minds on this island, with past participants going on afterwards to become successful scientists, researchers, academics and entrepreneurs – to name just a few,” Mr Walsh said.
BT Ireland had endeavoured to enhance and evolve the exhibition, he said. This included Introducing the Primary Science Fair for 3rd to 6th class primary school students and launching the first BT Young Scientist Business Bootcamp in 2010, which provides 30 young scientists with commercialisation and entrepreneurship skills for their future careers.
To encourage greater participation of students from outside Dublin, it introduced a travel and accommodation grant to help students who would need to travel considerable distances to compete – distributing €1.5 million to schools since 2006.
In latter years, it has been supporting DEIS schools – typically located in more economically deprived areas. In 2025, over 19 per cent of qualified projects (95 projects from 42 schools) are from students in DEIS schools, an almost 100 per cent increase from 2024 (48 schools).
For the first time ever, recipient(s) of the BT Young Scientist & Technologist of the Year award, along with four other category winners, will attend the World Expo in Osaka, Japan, while also representing Ireland at the EU Contest for Young Scientists. BTYSTE alumni have won the EU contest for a record 17 times in the past 35 years.
The 2025 BTYSTE opens to the public from Thursday to Saturday – a limited number of tickets are available at ticketing.btyoungscientist.com
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