With commencement season around the corner, 200 National Chiao Tung University (NCTU) students on the brink of graduating marked the impending milestone in an innovative way on Sunday, using 13,000 dominoes to create 19 elaborate displays.
It took them almost 36 hours of non-stop work to set up the dominoes at the university’s stadium in Hsinchu City.
Under the theme of “Memories and Photo Negatives,” the domino-toppling displays formed part of a series of events organized by the school’s Graduates’ Association in a bid to create unique, lasting memories for this year’s graduating class.
Photo: Hung Mei-hsiu, Taipei Times
The highlight of the event was an 8,000-piece 3D domino pyramid built by three students in the school’s Institute of Management of Technology: Yang Tzu-chien (楊子謙), Lu Hsueh-min (呂學旻) and Kao Ching (高靖).
It took the trio six attempts over many frustrating hours before they managed to erect the 39-layer structure, but just two seconds to topple the 8,000 tiles.
“Seeing the domino pieces collapsing one after another was mind-blowing. It made our hours of effort feel worthwhile,” they said afterward.
Graduates’ Association president Chang Ning-tien (張寧恬) was quoted by the Chinese-language Apple Daily as saying that Sunday’s domino-toppling show was in its fourth year and had been originally designed to help students perform better under pressure and instill the spirit of teamwork in them.
“[Building displays with] dominoes requires patience and perseverance. These are qualities vital to helping graduates rise to the new challenges that await them after school,” Chang was quoted as saying in the newspaper.
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