STEAM projects- Marble Run

Written by Jake, Room 13

Marble Runs

In Room 13 recently we have been working on making marble runs as an inquiry task. This has been helping us understand what it is like to make a science fair project.

We first had to plan our runs semi-accurately to what they would look like when it came to actually making them, whereas my group decided on one plan and then didn't follow it at all because we all forgot to bring the materials that we needed to actually make the run, so we improvised and made a completely different run. I don’t even know if this was just us or some other group(s) in the class.

Here is the method that we went through to make the marble run: 1. Get all the materials that you need ( cardboard and other plastic from your home.) 2. Cut cardboard to size to make ramps and walls so that you could actually have the marble run down the track 3. Glue and/or tape your ramps onto the backboard of your run (A large piece of flat cardboard) 4. Test 5. At this point it’s a choose your own adventure, if when you tested it it worked fine then make it look good if not keep fixing, editing and testing 6. Once your run is ready to be presented to whoever it is going to be presented to make it pleasing to look at! Add colour, pictures, even parts of a cereal box (My group did just that) 7. Once the run is complete you want to make sure the run actually works after you added all the aesthetics 8. Present the run!

We also had a ‘Big Question’ which is what we were actually testing in the run. Here is a brief explanation of a big question: Some peoples big question was if different surfaces affect run time, (My groups question was if marble size affected run time, as it turned out it did which is what I anticipated, but what I did not anticipate was that the smaller marble had a faster run time, it beat the larger marble by 50 milliseconds), it is basically a variable that we changed to test multiple parameters in the test.

We also had to do research on how marble runs worked (as in friction and gravity) and look at other marble runs for inspiration. After we did all our research and our marble runs were complete and had been presented to the class we had to put all our research, run times and all sorts of other things on a poster. All the posters will be presented in our class in due time so stop by to see them!

Thank you for reading my article about Room 13’s marble runs if you want to see them some of them are still in the class but be quick all the marble runs may have all been taken home by the time this article goes out so don’t be disappointed if they are not here.

-This article was written by Jake Patterson.