Dominoes are small rectangular blocks used as game pieces. When one is knocked down, it sets off a chain reaction that causes other dominoes to fall. This premise has inspired many games, including the popular board game of Dominoes, and it also inspired the idiom domino effect, which describes any situation in which one action prompts a series of reactions. Dominoes can also be stood up to create elaborate patterns, and they can be arranged to form three-dimensional structures like towers and pyramids.
Dominos have a number of properties that make them useful for science and education. For example, the speed at which a domino falls depends on how fast it is pushed. This makes it easy to model the movement of nerve impulses through a nerve cell, or neuron.
Scientists have also found that a domino has the same energy as an electron, which gives it some interesting properties. The kinetic energy of a domino is the sum of all the forces pushing on it, and its potential energy is the amount of energy that could be released if the domino were to be pushed past its tipping point.
The most common set of dominoes has 28 tiles. Larger sets exist, but they’re mostly used for game play involving multiple players. The most popular type of domino play is known as layout games, which are divided into two categories: blocking and scoring games. A player wins a blocking game by attaching a domino to an existing row of dominoes so that its ends are divisible by five or three. The first player to do so scores a point. The other player may then attach a new row of dominoes to the ends of those already attached, so that the sum of the new rows is divisible by five or three. Each time the player does so, he or she earns another point.
Lily Hevesh began playing with her grandparents’ classic 28-piece domino set when she was 9 years old. She loved the way that a simple flick of a domino caused other dominoes to fall in a straight or curved line. She’s now a professional domino artist who designs and creates domino setups for movies, TV shows, events, and more.
When you’re ready to try your hand at creating some domino art, start by planning out a design for your creation. Decide what kind of pattern you want, and then figure out how many dominoes you’ll need to build it. It’s a good idea to write down the plan before you begin, so that you can refer back to it as needed. Next, prepare the dominoes by arranging them so that all of the pips on one end are matched up with those on the other. This is important, because if the number on a domino’s pips isn’t equal to the number on an adjacent domino’s pips, it will not fall when the first domino is flipped over.