STEM Club - Marble Run

Learners at Acton Academy Columbus work on real-world challenges every week. One of the ways we do this is through our STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Math) Projects. We’ve now expanded that to the Sunday STEM Club and have opened it to all children beyond the learners at Acton. .

Last week, we worked on building a volcano. The eruption from the volcano had our STEMers jumping for joy!

This past weekend we worked on an engineering project to build our own Marble Run.

We first went over the engineering process - Ask, Learn More, Create, Improve.

The STEMers paired up in teams of two and started working through a plan. They drew out how the Marble Run should look and then gathered all the materials they needed.

The STEMers had to make many adjustments along the way. The process of experimenting, failing, improving, and trying again is a critical part of how we learn at Acton Academy. It’s an important part of the process of engineering.

The end result was a couple of well designed marble runs!

The power of real world challenges stick a lot harder than a scantron and test papers.