Marble Roller Coaster

 

During the summer I’m doing some things with my kids for geography that we couldn’t necessarily do during our geography co-op.  This was definitely one of those times.
We read Disney World (Going Places) and it certainly made my kids want to go.  They’re already planning where they want to go.
 
So, then I had to redirect them to our activity.  Making a roller coaster ride.

We then spent the next 30 minutes fine-tuning and messing about with toilet paper rolls, tape, and random pieces of paper trying to make sure the marbles made it all the way to the end.

The first few times we tried the marbles went flying off into who knows where (over a week later I’m still finding marbles, it’s kind of sad).

That being said, this is not the activity to do with little kids.  Marbles are popping up all over.

But, we did learn a few things from this:

1.  If there is nothing to stop the marbles they will keep going, so we needed to add “back stops” for lack of a better word.
2.  Sometimes the tubes needed extra support, so we had to go back in and add extra tape.
3.  Different sized marbles acted different ways.
4.  Have something to catch the marbles at the bottom.

Afterwards we talked about what it must be like for the people designing these rides, because if that had been people on our ride we would have been in a lot of trouble.  The designers have to put a lot more thought and care into their work than we did.
Let’s see what others did this week:

Journey to Excellence shared about a fun field trip to Bass Pro Shop.  I need to check and see if my local one has event like this.  It’s also a good reminder to try stores for field trips.

Little Wonder Days has a super great idea of showing how animals mark their territory.  I am so stealing this for our Land Animals study this year.

Relentlessly Fun, Deceptively Educational has a great idea for learning about squid propulsion.
As you no doubt have figured out, I’m grabbing a few posts to share each week, but I wanted to make sure you knew that when you’re linking up.  There isn’t a super good rhyme or reason to my choosing.  Sometimes it’s “That’s so cool!,” sometimes it’s “how thought provoking.”  I’ll share between 2-4 posts each week.