Making a Pinball Machine

Our kindergarten scientists were really excited to start our science unit on pushes and pulls, especially when they realized we would be making a pinball machine. We began the unit by asking what makes an object move?  We walked around the room with a partner to find out how objects move. We noticed that nothing was moving until we did something to make an object move. This question led us to discover that objects only move when a force is exerted. We read the book A Busy Day in Pushville. In this story, we observed the use of forces all over town as people pushed and pulled objects in order to do their jobs. 

Now that we understand how to exert a force to make an object move, we got to begin our pinball machines. Each set of partners received a piece of cardboard, a shoelace, and a rubber band. Together they worked to find a way to use these items to build their box model of a pinball machine and design a launcher to start the movement of the pinball. During this process, students experienced a range of emotions while trying to persevere through their experimentation. We made a few mistakes when designing our launchers. Some launchers were too high so the pinball would roll under the launcher. Others were not high enough, so the pinball would just roll over the launcher. We also struggled to get the launchers to stay attached to the box. Throughout our experiments we stopped to share our struggles and successes with each other to learn from the scientists around us. As we gathered this information we gained more confidence in our designs until we found the best launcher design.

The next day, we focused on a new question, how do we make a pinball move as far as we want? We discovered the meaning of the word distance and played a game to figure out how to use exert different forces to travel short and long distances. One person sat a long distance from their partner with a string between them to represent a short distance. The students practiced pushing a tennis ball to get it to travel different distances. We learned that using a gentle force makes the ball travel a short distance while using a strong force makes the ball travel a long distance. We are excited to use this information with our pinball machines over the next few days. Then, we will be moving on to answer how do we make a pinball travel to a certain place and how do we make a moving pinball change direction. We can't wait!