Tuesday, May 29, 2007

Marble tracks and juggling balls

We started by exploring some of the commercial marble tracks that were available. Soon the students moved on to creating their own tracks out of cardboard. They attached them to the wall with pins and spent ages testing and modifying to get the best results.


Along the way one of the girls started juggling with a couple of marbles and that led to making juggling balls the following week.
Filled with rice, each ball needs three balloons to make them colourful and strong. Some of the challenges ...
How to get the rice into the first balloon
How to get the balls the same size
How to avoid spreading rice from one end of the class to the other!!!!
The biggest challenge though is learning to juggle!
For New Zealand readers the instructions for these are in the School Journal part 3, no. 2, 1997





More carrot cars
In subsequent weeks the students continued experimenting - adding drivers, finding better ways of attaching wheels and then moving into designing other vehicles like this motor bike.