STEM CHALLENGE: Make a Cardboard Marble Maze!

A couple of weeks ago I rearranged our already pretty relaxed home schooling schedule to take Fridays off. Now, we spend Mondays and Tuesdays focussing on math and reading/writing. On Wednesdays we focus on a STEM challenge, and Thursdays we focus mainly on art and music. Landon calls Wednesday and Thursday “fun school” 😂

One Wednesday, we spent the afternoon doing this fun marble maze challenge. We saved empty paper towel and toilet paper rolls for the last couple of months to reuse with some duct tape and a box. Landon got creative and planned where he wanted his marbles to go, and then through lots of trial and error we worked together to make it work. We ended up with two different routes for the marbles to take, including going through the inside of the box.

We ran into some good learning opportunities, like what would happen if we tried different sizes of marbles? Does the marble maze work the same when the marbles are moving faster or slower? How can we change the speed of the marbles? How can we prevent the marbles from falling out of the maze?

Ried and Landon also have been enjoying racing their marbles for weeks with this thing now. I didn’t expect it to last that long, but at this point they have named all of their marbles and race them.