The children are always extremely excited about this project. This is a project they ABSOLUTELY LOVE and children learn most by doing things they love. And it is a real STEM-project in which all of the 21st century skills (collaboration, creating and innovation, ICT, communication, finding and evaluating information, problem solving, analytical thinking) are integrated. We motivate children to improve their skills on ALL areas, not only language and mathematics. Most important, children improve their CREATIVITY which isn't a subject in school, but should be integrated in each subject as much as possible! A teacher in Bulgaria told me a pupil in her class asked her parents not to buy her a tablet for Christmas, but to buy her materials so she could go and create a chain reaction. Some pupils from Iceland mailed their teacher little movies of chain reactions they made in the parents' bedroom. The results can be watched at the blogs mentioned above. Especially this entry in the first edition of this project is real eye-candy and a true example for all rube-goldberg-machines to come: https://vimeo.com/18713502 Our project attracts kindergartens too! This year a kindergarten from Germany won the ECR2015 competition with this fantastic entry: https://vimeo.com/117489474 In the 5 years that this project has been running we have never seen the same chain reaction twice so it proves children can be very creative in thinking about new ways of creating chains and the standards of the rube goldberg machines have risen to whole new levels so - we think - not only the children are learning but the teachers do too! BUT what motivated us most to continue this project is what school inspectors told us: Scotland: "The European Chain Reaction is the very best example of cross curricular work in International Education that we have witnessed in the four years that we have been touring schools, looking at International Educational projects!" SEE ATTACHMENT

In the beginning we only had 13 countries participating, but we attracted some more countries as we gained some more visibility while winning some awards: MEDEA-award 2011: Best European collaboration in the creation of educational medea / UK eTwinning award: cross-curricular integration of eTwinning / Lithuania Best eTwinning school / Belgium network-award / ...
This year 32 countries participated in the project but we aim at – one day – gathering all eTwinningPlus countries (41 countries). In all editions each year a couple of hundreds of children have participated.