Marble Runs!

This week, we met with our 3-4 buddies for a fun STEAM/STEM project (STEAM stands for science, technology, engineering, art, mathematics). The challenge was to create a marble run from available materials in our outdoor space including sticks, rocks, bark, and earth. We did allow them to use man made furnishings that could be found in our outdoor space (benches, tables, chairs) as well as cardboard out of the recycling. When their runs were ready, we had big shooter marbles as well as smaller ones for them to test out their tracks.

The kids used a lot of ingenuity in their constructions. Ramps were made using cardboard boxes, tubes, tracks dug in the ground, sticks as runners, and natural slopes with stick or stone railings to guide a marble.  There were a few tricky innovations that set up marbles to jump at the end of their ramp to land in a bucket or box and one group even set up a curved track underlay so that the marble would reverse directions when it dropped from one ramp to the next. This process involved a lot of planning and calculation, not to mention a lot of trial-and-error test runs, but the kids were all pleased with their finished run.

All kids had a really good time in this endeavor and enjoyed teaming up with their buddies from the 3-4 classes. Check out the pictures below to see the marble runs they created.