Challenge For A Marble Roller Coaster Project

Gravitational potential energy and kinetic energy.

Challenge for a marble roller coaster project.

Teams of 3 or 4 participants design and build a marble run that keeps a marble rolling for the longest time. Physics examines and explains those rules. Build a roller coaster with 2 hills and one loop. Layers of learning has hands on experiments in every unit of this family friendly curriculum.

The criteria are in italics the constraints are in bold a. Objects on earth always follow the same physical rules. Your marble must not fall off until it gets to the end of the track. In roller coaster construction this is called track banking this is a good opportunity to explain the negative effects of momentum.

Roller coasters rely on two types of energy to operate. Each team gets 10 paper tubes 2 cereal boxes 5 cups 1 pair of scissors 1 roll of tape and at least 1 marble. If a curved track is not banked the marble may fly off of the edge of the track. Introduce the parameters of the design challenge and the vocabulary words criteria and constraints.

You ll build a roller coaster track for marbles using foam pipe insulation and masking tape and see how much of an initial drop is required to get the marble to loop the loop. This is a really fun project even if you don t like going on roller coasters yourself. Build your own marble roller coaster in this project and find out. Learn more about layers of learning.