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Bishop Creighton Academy

Shaky hand testers!

At the end of last half term, Year 5 created their own shaky hand testers. A shaky hand tester game  is a steady hand game that is well known to many as a table top amusement. It is a challenging and competitive game, where you are playing the number of touches against time. The player has to get the right balance between speed and skill in order to obtain the winning score.

Year 5 researched the shaky hand tester game, as our theme last half term was fairgrounds. We wanted to know how do fairground rides work? We spent time creating circuits, using bulbs, batteries, wires, lamps and buzzers; before we thought about creating our own game. 

We decided to create a buzz wire game (A shaky hand tester), as we could collect resources in the classroom for this. 

For those of you who don’t know the game, the aim is to guide the grip mounted loop through the wire maze without touching the loop against the metal maze all the way to the end.

If the metal loop touches the maze, even for a fraction of a second, the alarm will sound and the player must start again. The winner will be the player who reaches the end of the maze in the quickest time.

Firstly we bought our own show boxes and painted those for the base of our game, we loved this and enjoyed mixing colours together whilst painting.

We then allowed the shoe box to dry, before we created our circuit. We had some copper wire, a battery holder, a battery, a buzzer and some crocodide clips to create our circuit. 

We enjoyed making our circuits and playing with our shaky hand tester games. We even wrote a set of instructions to go alongside our practical work; for all those who may want to try and make their own. You can view our photo albums for our set of instructions. It was an amazing experience and you should have a go too!