Crystal Growing Competition 2002

National Crystal Growing Competition 2003

As in previous years, the Eastern Region event will be run by me and will cover (roughly) Cambridgeshire and Bedfordshire. Schools in neighbouring counties which are on Cambridge SATRO's mailing list are also included. If your school didn't receive anything, see below

The winning crystals in the Eastern Region from the Key Stage 1 & 2 and the Key Stage 3 age groups will be put forward to the National Competition. This year the local judging will be on a per-school basis rather than by an individual pupil or group.

How to enter

The competition is being run nationally and co-ordinated by the RSC's South-East Region Education Committee through Smooth Science. The best crystals from the regional events will be collected together and judged at the British Crystallographic Association's Spring Meeting at the University of York in April, 2003.

Entry forms in PDF format (for which you will need a free reader, available from ) are available on-line:

Schools in Bedfordshire and Cambridgeshire (or those nearby which receive mailings from the Mid-Anglia SATRO) can use this form.
an entry form for schools in other parts of the UK and Eire will be available shortly.

The contest is being split into regional groups - the winners in each region will have their crystals put forward to the national event.

Further information about deadlines etc for the contest will appear here soon.

Results of the 2003 Eastern Region Crystal Growing Competition

Photographs of the prize-giving at the CCDC

Results of the 2002 Eastern Region Crystal Growing Competition

Photographs of the prize-giving at the CCDC

Details of past events

We have some photos of the winning crystals from the Eastern Region in the 1999 contest; There's also a nice picture of the 1999 National winning crystals, unfortunately it hasn't been annotated except for the crystal masses! The large crystal came First in the International Crystal Growing Competition that was held at the International Union of Crystallography's Congress that was held in Glasgow, Scotland, in August 1999.

Details of the judging and scores awarded to the crystals in Glasgow are now available.

Other competitions worldwide;

A page from a similar competition to this one (prepared by Chris Young), run in Canada; in previous years they've grown a different compound to ours, but this year they decided to use alum as well.
Belgium is holding its competition again this year (run by Luc van Meerveldt in Leuven) - if you can read Deutsch, Vlaams or français there is plenty of useful advice there.
Singapore holds an event which is more of a challenge, especially for older children; the Juniors grow sodium chlorate, the Seniors grow the difficult nickel sulfate hexahydrate (they tell me that the heptahydrate is easy), and the Open group grow a crystal of an organic or metallo-organic compound of their choice.

Additional information on crystals and how to grow them can be found at various sites on the Internet;

What may still be the world's largest fast-growth crystal, grown at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in the USA - 66cm across (no prizes for telling me what compound it is!)
Some recipes for growing crystals derived by Paul D. Boyle of North Carolina State University from the book "Crystals and Crystal Growing", by Alan Holden and Phyllis Morrison. He's also set up a Frequently Asked Questions or FAQ page, which may be informative.
Allan Campbell in New Zealand has some interesting pages about crystals and crystal growing. It's also a handy source of information on how to wipe out stains!
Snowflakes are composed of crystals; pictures and descriptions of the hows and whys of snowflake formation have been collected by a researcher in the field, Kenneth G. Libbrecht.
The British Crystallographic Association has some useful links as well!

This page is maintained by Harry Powell , but the flags come from The World Flag Database.

Disclaimer:
These pages are my personal pages. The opinions expressed here are not necessarily those of the Laboratory of Molecular Biology or the Medical Research Council .