Paper Coasters with Makey Makey and Scratch

I truly believe students take more ownership with their learning when they are a part of the learning process instead of being a spectator.  Students will retain more with project based learning than reading concepts found in a textbook and completing a worksheet.  Especially in science, students need to touch, manipulate and experiment their learned concepts to fully comprehend them.

Therefore to demonstrate the laws of motion, students created original marble paper roller coasters using a template purchased at paper rollercoasters.com.

For $20 you receive a pdf file you can repeatedly print.  Besides the template, you need marbles, lots of paper, cardstock and scotch tape to construct the coaster.  The file also includes instructions how to use the templates to build many types of tracks including straight, curves, loops, and more.

Once my class understood the concepts of Newton's Laws, they designed coasters based upon a theme eg., underwater adventure, speed freak, candy land, etc.

While each step of the process, they explained their designs applying what they have learned in science.  The project also exercised collaboration along with trial and error as students had to continuously test their coasters and make modifications throughout the project.



Besides  industrial engineering, students then learned basic coding using Scratch and wrote programs based upon their theme to supplement their coaster.  We placed conductive tape on the track with a second thin layer hovering over the first so when the marble rolls over, it will apply enough pressure to push them together to complete the circuit.

Makey Makeys are connected to the tape to run their scratch program which includes animation, music and sounds.

It was a rewarding project which tested them on many levels and they were very proud of their accomplsihements as they invited many classes to try out their coasters and were very eager to explain the physics behind their project.

Cooper at camp