When we got together on Saturday we both had a few ideas and looked at all the materials and tools in Alexas house that we could use. There was so much too choose from. We started building the “seven dwarfs mine train”, we cut open a long tube (from wrapping paper) and cut it in 3 piece and taped it to the wall, using blue tape. The tubes had a down angle and we tried to let the marble go down. At our first try, the marble bounced out of the tube. We came up with a solution; use a cup at the end of each track to stop the marble from flying out. This did not work, the marble got stuck in the cup. We then tried turning the cup to have the bottom face the marble… IT WORKED! We did this on all track parts and the marble made it down the “mine train”. We will decorate it later.
We moved a small cabinet next to the wall to start our next part “Thunder Mountain”. We build a marble run and connected the wall track to the top of the mountain. A few times the marble bounced out of the track before it got to the mountain. We used extra paper and tape to stop the marble bouncing out. Right now, it looks just like a marble run, we need to make it look like a mountain with paper or something.
After the mountain the marble goes down a long tube and our idea was to have it hit a car, that would then go down a ramp to hit dominos to set off the next step. The car would not stay on the ramp because it was too heavy. We tried to put some tape on the ramp but it did not work. We then tried different balls. the ping pong ball worked best with a tunnel around it to stop it from falling off the track. The Ping Pong ball goes from the track to the dominos. The Dominos and long tube we called “Splash Mountain”. Next stop is the “Tower of Terror”. This is a pulley. We watched a youtube video on how to make one.
We followed the instructions on the video and made the pulley. WE had Alexa’s brother and his friend help us build a tower to hold the pulley. We then tried all the steps of the project to see if they worked. You can see that in this video.
I think we learned so much from this day. The way we had made our sketch and how it really worked was different, we had to come up with new ideas all the time.
Next week we are going to make the pulley move up, build more and decorate.
Let’s take a look at how this is going to work: