Marble Mania

Over the past few days our 5th graders have been working diligently on their marble science projects. Students had been learning about momentum, speed, velocity and distance. This project (all credit is given to Ms. M who came up with and taught the lesson) was intended to get students thinking about ways they could maximize a few of these things (distance, and speed) to come up with the slowest moving marble time.

Students were:
Paired with a partner
Given a piece of cardboard
and given plenty of supplies to be as creative as they wanted to be

The goal of the project was to create a maize or path for the marble on your piece of cardboard that would produce the slowest travel time for the marble to make it end to end. Students had to decide where to start their marble, what to use to get it moving, what obstacles to slow the marble down, etc. There are two projects I happened to capture on my computer and I have attached them here. I was really impressed with the outcome of everyone's project. The fastest time ended up being 13 seconds!