Introduction

We are sixth class students in St. Joseph's NS, Kinvara, Co. Galway. There are 29 students in our class. Here is the story of how we came to enter the START Competiton and you will find the steps we took to carry out our trial on subsequent pages of our website.

Earlier on this year, in October, Sean’s Mom (Olive) came into our classroom and explained about the START competition and clinical research.

She explained that if a new medicine comes out they have to test it so to see which medicine is better, they give some patients the new medicine the (test group) and others the old medicine (control group). After a couple of weeks with the new medicine they see who has a better/worse reactions and that is a clinical trial.

To demonstrate she gave us her famous chocolate rice krispies cupcakes. She put smarties on them, she wanted to know do all smarties taste the same depending on their colours.

She taught us how about randomisation and how to randomly split groups . She carried about the test by putting pieces of paper with A and B in a hat , the whole class picked from the hat .

The A group got the normal buns with random coloured smarties and the B group got the buns with only blue smarties .

We found out that it doesn't matter what colour it is they all taste the same. Now it was time for us to come up with our own research question.