Blue Fusion

Instruments for measuring the passing of time have been around since man first started to invent. Now delve into the physics of how these instruments work as student teams compete head to head to build the perfect timepiece.

Making the most of "expensive" equipment found normally only in the Blue Peter cupboard, teams will endeavour to create a device that utilises physics to accurately measure a short period of time. The activity will demonstrate how even a basic knowledge of physics can be used to monitor the hands of time.

Genetic fingerprinting is a new and exciting field of science with many uses, from detection of diseases to the capture of criminals. Although in reality it is a very complex and time-consuming procedure.

Dragonetics allows students to apply the same logical steps of reasoning and deduction to spot genetic links in a population. The team will be given a partial family tree of dragons, and by looking for patterns and similarities in this tree they will be able to fill in the empty spaces with the correct missing dragons. By the end of the exercise, the team will be able to identify genetic traits and diseases in a given dragon by just analysing its genetic fingerprint, in the same way that genetecists do for real species today. Scoring for this activity will be based on the success with which the students work as a team to fill in the dragon family tree and extract information from a genetic fingerprint.

With current concerns about global warming there has been a push to decrease the emissions of CO2 and other greenhouse gases. 158 nations have committed to the Kyoto Protocol; a set of targets to decrease emissions to levels below those of 1990 by 2012. These nations account for over 55% of the greenhouse gas emissions from industrialised countries.

In this activity students will be given the opportunity to act as the government of such a nation. They will have to balance the needs of their country, their citizens and the environment. The popularity of their government and financial implications of their choices will be taken into account. This will give students an opportunity to see how pure science must interact with practical politics in the real world.

To complete Light Fantastic your team will have to work together to transfer the coloured lights from their source, through a maze, to the targets.

That might sound simple, but to solve the puzzle, the combination of colours at the end of the board must be in the correct order. The more lights you get to the correct target, the more points your team earn. To make things even more tricky your team will have to work together to answer questions. For correct answers you will earn the puzzle pieces and win the plans to reveal what routes the light takes through the mystery ‘blackout’ pieces. To move the light through the puzzle you will use optical fibres.

Robots can be used to perform many tasks which are either too dangerous, difficult or expensive for a human to perform. They are also very good at performing repetitive tasks that humans would find too boring or time consuming. However, robots cannot think or react on impulse in the same way as humans can and must therefore be carefully designed and programmed and their task must be clearly defined for them in advance.

Robot Challenge teaches the students how to program lego robots, which they must then use to perform two tasks. First the robots must clear a number of bricks from a defined space and the students will be scored based on how many bricks they successfully clear. Secondly, the robots must be programmed to find and knock over a bomb to disarm it. The bomb has flashing lights and a count-down timer that beeps, and they will be scored based on the time it takes to disarm the bomb.

Our galaxy, the Milky Way, is abundant in variety. Even within our own solar system we see so much variety in the worlds around us. Giant gassy Jupiter with its many moons such as frozen Europa and volcanic Io; cratered Mercury where the side facing the sun can be 500C hotter than that facing away; distant Pluto who takes more than two centuries to orbit the sun and, of course, the wet temperate Earth. Recently NASA and ESA have sent missions to these worlds to learn more about them.

Search for a Planet allows the students to travel further afield in order to find planets suitable for human habitation. They are given a database of potential planets and have to use clues provided to work out which planet would be the best to support human life. Students will need to consider many factors such as the wavelengths of light at which we can see, what kind of temperatures we can survive at, the gravity that different planets will have, what atmospheric components we need and what kind of surfaces we can live on.

For many years, sensory impaired people have been unable to use technology as effectively as others. Thankfully, this has been changing recently, with technology being seen as an enabler rather than a barrier. For this to continue, it is essential that people understand some of the difficulties faced by the sensory impaired.

Three Wise Monkeys combines restricted communication methods with a fun detective puzzle. As well as discovering which of the six monkey suspects stole some highly prized bananas by collecting clues and decoding them, the team will have to communicate and co-operate despite some of them having limitations put on them. Scoring for this activity will be based upon how effectivley the students work as a team to solve which monkey is the thief.

Train your athlete to their full potential and race against your competitors in a game designed to test both team spirit and project planning to the extreme.

Students must produce a tight schedule of training and nutrition while finding time to monitor the performance of the athlete to further improve the training/nutrition cycle. The activity will race home the importance of good planning and show how difficult it can be to balance development and testing in the real world.

A virus is a computer program that spreads by inserting copies of itself into other executable code or documents. Organisations of any size, as well as individual PC users avoid getting viruses in their system with great efforts.

In the Virus Attack activity, students will learn how to defend networks against viruses in a highly connected environment. A map containing a network of computers will be given and the students must apply various types of protection in response to threats. Players score more points for having less network/server down time throughout the game. Real world use is based on corporate networks spread over a large area such as the Internet.