Dominoes are a classic toy for children that can teach them about the power of physics. The pleasure of watching one small movement set off a chain reaction is also mesmerizing for adults. These lessons of the domino effect are also relevant to students and their learning challenges. A student may compensate for a learning challenge with other skills and in the process, stop developing that essential skill.
Physicist Lorne Whitehead has demonstrated that the force required to knock over one domino is equal to the sum of the forces exerted on the dominos next to it and on all the other dominos in the row. This is known as the Domino Effect and it shows that a chain reaction can be much larger than we might expect.
Hevesh is a professional domino artist and has built mind-blowing domino setups for movie and music events. Her YouTube channel, Hevesh5, has 2 million subscribers and features videos of her creations. She has also participated in Domino shows, where teams build elaborate domino reactions for a live audience. These sets can include hundreds or thousands of dominoes and each requires a lot of planning and precision to create. When Hevesh starts working on a new installation, she follows her version of an engineering-design process.
She begins by considering the theme of the piece and brainstorms images or words she might want to use in the design. She then maps out a rough draft of the layout. This is a key step in her work because she wants to make sure the dominoes will fall in a way that reflects the intended theme of the piece.
When Hevesh is happy with her plan, she begins to construct the dominoes. She takes special care to ensure the pieces will fit together and she measures each domino to determine its exact size. She also takes into account the direction of each domino and how it will be used in the final piece.
Once Hevesh completes construction, she is ready to test the dominoes. She will place the first domino in the desired position and then a little bit of energy will be used to push it over. As the domino is pushed, some of its potential energy converts to kinetic energy, which gives it the momentum needed to push over the next domino. This continues until the last domino falls.
In the same way that the dominoes are tested to make sure they will fall in the right order, story writers must check their scenes to ensure that they flow logically from one scene to the next. This can be tricky if your characters are doing things that run outside societal norms. For example, if your hero shoots someone or has an affair. To keep readers engaged, you will need to provide the motivation and logic for why your hero is going against societal expectations. The best way to do this is to lay out the scenes in order and then take a step back to see how they all work together.