My TY by Mitchell Deane- AMBER
On Monday the 15th of November I travelled to Trinity College Dublin to partake in the TY course run by Dr. Hugh Manning. The first day was based around Climate change but before we could start discussing it and its related problems we had to get to know each other. I was joined by 15 other TY student with an interest in Science and maths. The group of students came from across Ireland. To get us talking we had to fill in a sheet with everyone’s name, where they were from and a task that changed from hobbies to dream job to favourite kind of donut. We also had to line up in different orders like height, first name, County and birth month, this really helped us to get to know each other. After we had lunch we went to what’s called a mac lab which is just a very fancy computer room, Here we were given a talk about the impact of sea level rise and how it would affect the rivers in Ireland possibly flooding major towns and living spaces. We used interactive maps that let us choose the level of sea water rise from a few meters up to hundreds, we were asked about our thoughts on the effectiveness of these maps to display the problems we could face because of climate change .
On Tuesday the 16th we started by playing a few more simple bonding games before we got into a talk form a post doctorate researcher on The past present and future of optical communications this include seeing and talking about optical fibre the sort that is used for some homes Wi-Fi. We also got look at lasers that in theory could transmit data we also talked about how 5G would work on phones and its problems and functionality after this we had a talk about electronic circuits and flexible phone screens. Played around with making some simple circuits and got a talk for Dr. Manning on Nano wires and their useful properties that could be used in bendable phone screens. After lunch we went to a lecture hall where we were given a talk about graphite and its uses in better flexible batteries from DR. Joao. This contained a lot of information that we would later use in our mini projects. We also got a tour of Dr. Joao and Dr. Manning’s labs which included a demonstration on mixing graphene with a solvent to spray it out of and air gun in a thin layer.

On Wednesday 17th we started the day off with having a talk about the future of medicine, tissue engineering and bio printing where we discussed the uses and problems with printing organs, one problem that came up was the ethical problems such as would they need a live tissue sample from someone .We then went to a new lab sponsored by Johnson & Johnson. The lab focuses Tissue engineering and bio printing as well as normal 3d printing we got to do a variety of different activities such as creating a 3d model in solid works and exporting it to a 3d printer to print what we had just made. We also carried out what is called a GAG test which test to see if a sample of cartilage would be able to be grown into more to be injected into an athletes say knee to help them recover faster. We also got a chance to have our faces scanned into a computer to be turned into a 3d model which got printed. We used a machine that prints out solvent like materials that can be examined to see their properties and the properties of the materials in the solvent. We then got to have lunch with TCD undergraduate students where we got ask them questions about going to school in Trinity and what we could do our projects on and how we could make them better after we finished lunch we started brain storming our project. I chose to do the project based on a cylindrical phone with a pullout bendable phone screen this was later coined OPSGEN by me it stands for Optical Slim Generation which referred to the fact it was the next generation of phone that would be slim and based off new optical technologies (it was Also an anagram for sponge) we drew out our idea on a large sheet and made an action plan for the following days’ work.
On Thursday the 18th we first got a revolutionary tailored talk on d manufacturing which went through all the different types of additive manufacturing form the widely used injection molding to the newer 3d metal printing. We then got split into 2 groups one group went to look at the ins and outs of metal printing lab and how powder bed fusion printing works, while the other group was split in half again one staying to talk about the project while the other half went to the state of the art microscopy lab for a small tour whilst on that tour we got use a €300,000 microscope to look at a fly which has been covered in a thin layer of gold we also saw the control room for a €5 million microscope so sensitive it has to be in a room because a humans body heat would stop it from working. Once we were done there my group went to see the metal printing lab which included seeing different ways of printing a solid metal piece in an intricate shape. After lunch we started to do some more project work which include finalizing our ideas. 

On Friday the 19th we spent most of the day doing our projects including making a PowerPoint to show off our product and to show how it would be made. We also had to make a prototype and because the project was based on something in 2050 we obviously couldn’t make a working prototype we made it using plastic and card as well as drawing up a poster to show our design process. When we came back from lunch we held a showcase for students and professors to come talk to us about our projects a lot of the people that gave talks across the week came to see how their input played a role in our projects.
Over all the week was packed with fun and exciting talks, demonstrations and activities I also gained a whole new group of friends with extremely similar interests who I will hopefully stay in touch with in the future.

Mitchell Deane 4B