(upbeat music) - Hey, welcome to the Scott Family Amazeum.

My name's Alicia.

I'm a tinkering lead at our tinkering hub.

And today we're gonna talk about chain reactions.

So chain reactions is a really fun and creative way to explore cause and effect.

So it's like the dominoes, one thing happens that causes another thing to happen.

The best part of chain reactions is you can find things all throughout your home or wherever you are to create your own chain reaction.

When you're creating your chain reaction, think about things that roll, that may fall over, anything that has weight to it.

Things that are lightweight.

Tape and string are your friend.

(upbeat music) So let's get started with our chain reaction.

We have some different things out.

You can see we have videotapes, toys, all kinds of fun stuff.

So when you're creating your chain reactions, you want to have a goal to reach at the end.

So our goal today is to turn on Thomas Edison by this soft ball rolling through the tube and hitting the light switch.

We have to have some kind of height so that gravity can pull that ball down.

So I've stacked some things together to give it some height, which will help so that when the videos fall, they will hit the ball turning on the light.

(upbeat music) One little tinkering tip that we have found in the hub is to place tape on the side of your domino, blog, videotape in this instance, on the side where it's going to fall.

So when you need to reset, because you will, it's a lot of testing and trying, it helps you know where to place it.

So we have little pieces of tape on each one of our videos.

And once these create the domino effect of hitting these down, that will knock our ball down.

(upbeat music) The next step in our chain reaction is figuring out a way to knock down the videos.

To get the pot to swing, we have tied a string onto our plastic bowling pin that has a little bit of height to it.

We need it to be tall so that when our bowling pin falls off, this will swing far enough out to hit our videotapes.

(upbeat music) So once we have our string tied on, we need to move our blocks around till it's just right, which we have our string tied to our blocks.

We need to move our blocks around till it's just tight enough that when T-Rex moves and hits our blocks, it will pull our bowling pin.

So once our T-Rex hits our blocks, that will start our chain reaction.

So let's go ahead and try it.

Don't get discouraged if it doesn't happen the first time.

It rarely does.

And that's part of the fun of chain reactions is trying again, changing what you thought might happen.

(upbeat music) So thanks for playing with us today at the Scott Family Amazeum doing our chain reactions.

If you found this activity fun, go to our website at amazeum.org.

Look for amazeum you.

There's lots of other activities that you can enjoy at home.

Have a great summer.