A cardboard marble maze is a fun school project that turns simple craft materials into a hands-on science experiment. You build a path with cardboard walls, add holes as obstacles, and tilt the board to guide a marble from start to finish. The project matters because it teaches planning, testing, and improving a design.
It also helps students see how gravity, motion, and friction affect moving objects.
Key Facts
- Gravity pulls the marble downward, causing it to roll when the maze is tilted.
- A steeper tilt usually makes the marble speed up more quickly.
- Speed = distance ÷ time.
- Average speed can be written as v = d/t.
- Friction between the marble and cardboard slows the marble down.
- A good engineering design is tested, improved, and tested again.
Vocabulary
- Gravity
- Gravity is the force that pulls objects toward Earth.
- Friction
- Friction is a force that resists motion when two surfaces rub or touch.
- Tilt
- Tilt means to raise one side of a surface so it is slanted instead of flat.
- Prototype
- A prototype is a first model of a design that can be tested and improved.
- Constraint
- A constraint is a limit or rule that a design must follow, such as using only cardboard and tape.
Common Mistakes to Avoid
- Making the walls too low lets the marble jump over them, which makes the maze hard to control and unfair to test.
- Cutting holes too close to the start or finish makes the challenge depend more on luck than careful steering.
- Using too much glue or tape in the path creates bumps, which can stop the marble or change its motion in unexpected ways.
- Testing the maze only once gives weak results, because one run may not show which parts of the design need improvement.
Practice Questions
- 1 A marble travels 80 cm through a maze in 10 seconds. What is its average speed in cm/s?
- 2 A student wants the maze path to be 120 cm long. If each straight cardboard wall section is 15 cm long, how many sections are needed to make the path length?
- 3 If a marble keeps falling into the same hole, what are two design changes that could make the maze easier while still keeping it challenging?