Roller Coaster Challenge

It's always fun to spend the summer attending festivals, going to Great America and riding rides. We took those memories a step further to create our own roller coaster as a team! Students worked together with found objects, paper and tape to build a roller coaster that included at least one drop, one turn and one loop. Our "car" was a marble and they had to get creative to figure out ways to keep the marble on the paper track.

The students were very engaged in the process, while working together as a team.

They often had to rethink their designs to find different solutions to the problems they encountered.






One of the goals of this activity was not only to build teamwork and relationships within new classes, but also to introduce students to the design process. They were able to design the roller coasters, create them and then test them. After testing, they were given time to redesign parts of the project and recreate those parts to improve the function of the design. As in all learning, revisiting, re-imagining and redeveloping understanding are critical processes for students to go through. It was a very rewarding experience!