AWE Chain Reaction Competition 2009
On the morning of Friday 19th of June eight Yr 6 girls and Mrs Sams, Mrs Cope and Mrs Dillon (plus two large boards and assorted carrier bags of marbles, dominoes, duct tape etc) set off to Tadley Community Hall to attend a Chain Reaction Competition organised by the AWE graduates.
We arrived in good time and set about constructing our Chain Reaction. Once we were sure everything was in the correct place we began the difficult part of the proceedings ... getting our chain reaction to work! It was immediately obvious that there were several areas of our circuit that were in need of adjustment so that the marble or domino would do its job and start off the next part of the reaction. We split up into groups, each group taking a problem area and began to try and fix it. After some considerable time several of the group got their area of the circuit working and left us to go onto the next activity – designing a T-shirt. The rest of us kept battling on!!
Eventually it was time for the competition to start and we still hadn’t got our circuit working completely! We decided that Emma would stand next to our table and when it was our turn she would carefully (and discreetly) give the circuit a nudge if it stopped. Just before we were due to start disaster struck and the all the dominoes on the circuit before ours collapsed. It was decided to leave out that chain reaction and we were ready to begin.
The first chain reaction was set off and then the next and the next and then it was our turn.
Our chain reaction started of fine until it came to our second set of dominoes when Emma had to help it on it’s way by giving it a little nudge. It was then on it’s way and the chain reaction we had been working on for weeks was slowly unwinding .It was strange because the bits that didn’t work in our practices worked fine, but everything that ran smoothly failed us, so Emma gave it another helping hand.
At the end of our chain reaction we all were thankful that it had worked and nothing major went wrong, we were all very proud of what we had made and were a bit upset it was all over .But we were still very excited to watch the next bit in the long chain reaction the next one was very good and turned out to be the over- all winner.
Emma Lynch 6S
At last the graduates’ chain reaction – the last one- was set off and much to our relief they had to help theirs along as well!
We waited for the judges to confer and then it was time for the prize giving. The prizes for the T-shirts were awarded first and Flora Clarke won first prize. Then the prizes for the Chain Reactions were awarded and we were delighted to be given third prize and a cheque for £200.
We all had a great day even if it was a little frustrating at times!