Funfair

My secondary school had this policy of holding a funfair every four years. That was then; I wonder if they still have it now. The funfair was touted as a fundraising event, though I suspect it was more a reason to let us teenagers let down our hair and to encourage class cohesiveness. The gap of four years was also probably to ensure each batch of students had at least one chance of experiencing it.

In the funfair I was involved in, each class was assigned two stalls to run, a food stall and a game stall. Our class's food stall was a popiah stall. We had a classmate whose dad ran a popiah stall, so that fitted us to a T. As for the game stall, I was put in charge, together with the class monitor.

After much brainstorming, we settled on the crushing of mothballs running down a pipe idea. But we gave it a twist. We decided that a hammer and real mothballs would be potentially too damaging on the tables, foul-smelling and messy, so we replaced those with a overturned cup and marbles (those huge white ones). In addition, we had five pipes, instead of the single one, to add uncertainty to the mix.

What was left was just a theme and design to fit the pieces together. I got my inspiration from a Nintendo handheld game of the 80s, Mickey Mouse (see pic below). There was a whole series of these games by the name of Game and Watch.
Pic taken from intheattic.co.uk. I had the Mickey Mouse model whilst my sis received the Popeye one. From our parents, of course.

We modelled the pipes after the ramps along which the "eggs", in the form of marbles, will roll down. Like true scientists, we tested for the best angle to tilt one end of the pipes so that the speed of the "eggs" is neither excessive nor too slow. Once that is set, we put up a sturdy mounting board with five holes cut in it to hold up the ends of the five "ramps". Finally, we drew and painted five hens on top of each "ramps", to lay the "eggs". We also needed something to collect the errant "eggs". That was accomplished by making a drain to attach to the outside edge of the table.

So we were set. Until we saw the actual tables and location upon which to set up our stall. The ground was slanted from right to left. More brainstorming. We settled on those huge pebbles used in large ponds/aquariums to reverse the tilt.

Then we drew up a timetable on who to play "gamemaster" and who to help out with the running of the stall on the day of the funfair itself. Needless to say, both of us picked ourselves to take up two of the three "gamemaster" slots.

At the very last minute, someone hit upon the idea of advertising for our game stall via two humans masquarading as hens and roving around the school on the day. We volunteered two classmates (guys) and after much persuasion, they agreed. Albeit reluctantly. Their makeup and costumes were made by other classmates. We were all howling with laughter when we eventually saw them dressed up as hens.

It was great fun laying "eggs" for three hours. When my turn as "gamemaster" was up, I got to walk around and look at other stalls. There were one or two that also used the mothball-hammer idea. But with only one pipe, real mothballs and hammer. Their pipe was tilted way too high and there was no way anyone could have smashed any mothballs. And there wasn't any theme. We all agreed our stall was the best in terms of design and was also fully scientifically tested.

Towards the end of the day, I even gave my own game a try. I managed to catch 9 "eggs" out of 15 (Again, I remember the strangest and most minute details!) and won a pair of brass fish keychains for my efforts. I still have those two keychains.