In Science club, children have been making and testing marble
runs!
Made out of recyclable material, we had lots of fun exploring and
learning more about the design process, making adjustments as necessary. The
children found all sorts of ways of adding barriers and additional walls in
order to keep the marble moving through the run. No doubt there are many tweaks
that needed to be made while constructing a marble run in order to get to work
properly. Locating trouble spots and fixing them was one of the
best lessons in this project, as well as learning to listen to other
members of the team. The slopes that were almost vertical resulted in the
marbles dropping too quickly and spilling out of the run. I encouraged them to
think about how fast the marble was going and how that was related to the slope
of each run as changing the slope changes the speed of the object rolling down
it.
When it came to the testing phase, we discussed
how we needed to make it a fair test- the children came up with some fantastic
ideas. The children felt that we needed to use the same marble with the same
person from each team releasing the marble for continuity. Each run was tested
3 times so we could take an average time. The winning team were the ones whose
marble travelled through the run for the longest time.
