Marble Run

For the Take Your Child To Work Day this year myself and a friend decided that we would do a marble run for the children.  Rather than ordering tracks and pieces to assemble the marble run with, we decided to create/print our own tracks.  We created them in a way that the children could use Legos to hold the tracks up.  We also created a slanted Lego piece to assist in angling the tracks. 

If you do not know what a marble run is; it is where you have multiple teams that need to assemble tracks together that a marble can roll down and whichever team uses the most tracks or, as a tie breaker, has the fastest run wins.  One of the catches is if the tracks are too steep, and the marble has too much speed, the marble will jump the track and the team will be disqualified.

For our marble run we created two different types of tracks: a curved one and a straight one.  We then printed enough tracks so each team would have a total of four curved tracks and four straight tracks. 

We also created a slanted Lego type piece so the children could connect the tracks to the Lego pieces at an angle.  This was necessary because normal Lego pieces are not designed to connect at angles.  Below are images of the two tracks:

The kids had a great time.  Prior to the challenge, we gave the children an introduction to 3D printing and what you can do with it.  We then assembled them into teams of four and gave them 35 minutes to see how what they could come up with. 

You can download the tracks and the slanted piece here:  http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:2282240

Below are images of some of the runs that the children came up with.  I would absolutely recommend this project if you are looking for a STEM project to do with your kids.

Here are some of the other runs that the children did: