Making the longest marble run ever

October 2, 11:37 AMNorfolk Homeschooling ExaminerSherene Silverberg

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In our homeschool we are fans of activities that are fun and educational.   We especially enjoy ones that build engineering skills.

One of our favorite activities is to build marble runs from our third floor playroom, down the banisters and out the front door.

The first time we did this project my friend Lydia and I were intricately involved in the project.  However, now my kids merrily spend rainy afternoons building their own marble runs.  Duct tape, cardboard and Tinkertoys feature prominently in most of the designs. I just have to remind the children that duct tape only goes on cardboard and whenever they attach the run to walls or banisters the correct tape to use is masking tape.  So far we've been lucky and I haven't had to attempt to remove duct tape from painted surfaces.

 I am not sure who had more fun during our marble run building afternoon, Lydia, me, or the children. Who would have thunk that building a marble run could be so much fun? (Who am I kidding?  I knew it was going to be fun. I'm the mom who loves building train layouts with her children, of course I was going to enjoy building marble runs!)

I started off trying to pretend that this was a learning experience by trying to teach the children about gradients but the kids were having none of it. They just wanted to build and test.

Thank goodness for Freecycle. I put out a call for empty cardboard tubes and was royally rewarded.  I had enough cardboard tubes to build a marble run from Norfolk to Virginia Beach (or so it seemed).  Now I store all empty toilet roll and paper towel tubes in case we'll have a need for them.  I'm realizing that keeping certain types of trash is a very good idea if you have kids like mine who are always building and experimenting.

I never thought I would ever be thankful that we have three stories (I'd kill to live in a ranch), but when we build marble runs I am thankful for the additional height. We start building our runs on the banisters at the third floor landing take them down two floors, along the 2nd floor passage and down, out of our front door.

I set the collection box at a slight angle and it allows the kids to go wild with marbles with no fear of them running all over the place.   I was having nightmares about someone slipping on an errant marble and hurting themselves but thankfully the angled box caught all those marbles with ease.

The squeals of excitement as marbles barrel down the tubes are a joy to hear.

Constructing cardboard tube and duct tape marble runs help my children practice planning and testing skills.

They've discovered the hard way that they cannot build the entire run and hope that a marble will make it all the way to the end.

They have to build small sections and test each section.  They learned about gradients and bends experientially and not theoretically.  One of the hardest lessons they learned was that 90 degree bends on a flat plane do not aid the movement of marbles.   They also learned how to create gradients to help gravity move those marbles.

The last exercise is always to measure the length of the run. To do this, we measured it with a piece of string. Then we folded the string in half over and over again until we had a manageable piece of string that the children can measure with a yardstick.  Then it is a simple job to multiple that number of strands by the folded length.

 Marble run building is an activity that I whole heartedly endorse.  It's a good activity to help teach co-operative play, planning, testing along with gradients and gravity.