With a mission to provide students with hands-on science experiments that are fun and that explore the wonders of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics, Interactive Science Programs (ISP), a national not-for-profit science and math education company, sponsors the Ohio Valley School Spirit Domino Fall Engineering Competition.

Dover High School science teacher, Steve Sparks, saw the competition as the perfect way to engage his Principles of Engineering class made up of 14 sophomores, two juniors and three seniors. “Science is like real life. You don’t always get the answers easily and you need a lot of patience. The domino competition shows students the need to work together to solve problems,” said Sparks.

Using dominos and other supplies provided by ISP, the students had 72 hours to design, construct and execute a fall of 23,520 dominoes that they would video tape for the tri-state competition open to students in Ohio, Pennsylvania and West Virginia. Each participating school must demonstrate school spirit, engineering and innovation in their domino fall design.

The students’ design will be judged on the design of the fall, how it is videotaped and edited, other props used in the design, where the design is set up and different ways the fall is described.

Using the basement of the Dover Public Library, the students’ design wound through the stacks and every available space was used to construct ramps, bridges, a pendulum, and numerous designs that included tornadoes, script Dover, megaphones and many props. The only props that were prohibited were additional dominos.

“This has been more work than we anticipated,” said senior Chris Gibbons. “I take a lot of engineering classes and this has been challenging.”

“It has been beyond what we expected,” said sophomore Lindsay Laizure. “You’ll work on something for an hour and accidently knock it over and it will take two hours to put it back together.”

Frustration was apparent in the faces of the students who were present in the last hours of the competition. “We all have this sense of caution. We wish we could have one more day,” said sophomore Nate Frautschy. “There is a lot of creativity involved, but a lot of engineering, too.”

“We have a great sense of pride in what we have done here,” said Michelle House, a junior. “We are at the point now where we just want to get it done.”

Sophomore Thomas Burlett was directing the video-taping portion of the project. “We want to capture a lot of the engineering aspects. We have multiple cameras and with the use of mirrors, we will be able to utilize the reflected images. The edited video will include music that will be chosen later,” said Burlett.

The competition began Dec. 18 and continued through Dec. 20. Dover Public Library Director Jim Gill arranged for Domino’s Pizza to be delivered to the students on the first day of competition. “We were happy we could get Domino’s to donate pizza for the kids,” said Gill. “We are always glad when the library can help Dover High School. We had the space they needed.”

The materials borrowed for the competition had to be returned within the 72-hour period, so that meant students had to sort the thousands of dominos by color and place them back in their portable bins. Sparks then drove the supplies back to West Virginia Northern Community College at Wheeling, W.V., the host school for the competition.

“This has been a great experience. The kids are using what they have learned in class to make it work,” said Sparks. Sophomore Lauren Morgan added, “And we all know the sound of falling dominos.”

This is the first year Dover High School has participated in the competition. Sparks said he would like to do it again with future students.