Rollin' Rollin' Rollin'

This was one of my favorite projects of all time, and amazing to see the creativity of children.

            The ideas started while searching around some of my usual favorite blogs. They had set up PET bottles on a fence and had water running down. This sparked my memory of the marble race games I had as a child. I knew we had a few leftover tubes from the Omikoshi and the two large pegboards. I cut up the tubes and a few PET bottles so that whey would help catch the marbles. The main goal was to get the kids to set up their own runs rather than a permanent route. I tried brainstorming but the best I could think of was wire and was still a little difficult for me to set up. I had a few students help me set it up and see how they did with the wire. It was a little bit difficult but we did end up getting a full route built through trial and error. The only problem is that it was stuck there and not easy to adjust. We kept it there for a few days and tried to come up with some ideas with kids. I had a few extra tubes and pet bottles the kids would use to make the ball continue on the ground, or for them to finish the bottom 1/3 of the course while holding on the tubes. They loved it but knew we could think of something soon.

            I love building, and around the same time decided to build a few gigantic geoboards. They stared with them on the ground and then moved them to a center so that they can work vertically.

I ended up putting the board right next to our attempt at a marble run. It was not my intent to use this for the marble run as well but because the materials (extra tubes and pet bottles were right next to each other the students navigated over to the geoboards and it would now be used to hold the tubes and PET bottles. They used the rubber bands and bottles/tubes to create their own routes, it worked PERFECTLY! It was a hit in the class and always full of students thinking of amazing ideas. Some were more simple while some made attempts at amazing routes I would have never tried, they seemed to defy gravity. One of my favorite things about young children is their “ability” of “not knowing” they do things however they want, not because they had seen somebody do it before. They use resources in completely different ways than we do. They don’t see the intended purpose (a hammer is for nails) but for something completely new and an object that can be anything.

So after a few weeks we were building bigger and more intricate designs. They even had then go from the bottom all the way across the classroom!

They discovered …

• Greater angles = greater speed
• The amount of rubber bands needed to help hold it up and not drop from holding the marbles
• How to communicate with each other since often they had to have others hold different parts at different times
• How to draw designs of what they wanted to do, so they could remember for the next day
• That if you put the tube flat it will slow down
• Many more little elements of physics!