It's Cardboard Arcade Season in the STEM Lab

One of my favorite STEM Lab projects, and one of the most over all successful, is the cardboard arcade. It is one of the few units that I have run every year since founding the lab and I have yet to get tired of it. That's because after hundreds of cardboard arcade games passing under my gaze, I am continually surprised by what the students come up with. I have settled on doing this project with 3rd grade for no better reason than it helps students learn the construction techniques that I want them to employ going forward. It demonstrates in a very real way that masking tape is not the best material to hold to large pieces of cardboard together with when people are going to be throwing balls at it for an hour.

For anyone who is not familiar with this unit, it is one of many offshoots from the original Caine's Arcade seen in the movie at the link. In short, a 9 year old boy in Los Angeles named Caine spent the summer at his father's auto parts store and entertained himself by making replica arcade games with the left over boxes around the shop. Filmmaker Nirvan Mulick discovered Caine's Arcade when he stopped in to by a door handle for his car and made a movie about it. Since the film debuted the cardboard arcade has become a staple of the maker movement in schools. 

One of the best parts of this unit is inviting other classes, usually first grade or kindergarten to the lab to try out the games. I have found that when students know they will have an audience from beyond their class and me, they become more deeply engaged and personally invested in their work. They are more apt to take creative chances that result in project far more wonderful than anything I could assign.

Use The Forces!

This rotation of STEM Lab finds the second graders exploring forces and motion by building mazes and marble runs. This is one of those experimental units that I implement from time to time. As a result, each group's experiences and projects were a little different as I tweaked and adjusted based on how well various activities went in previous interactions.

The unit began with students recording some simple observations in their journals how a marble rolls around in a paper box lid with some straws taped to it. I gave them some starter questions, 'how does the marble move when the box is flat? When you tilt the box?' and so on. We discussed their observations and then did some research into force and motion with Brain Pop Jr. Students took notes in their journals about words like motion, position, and force. We discussed how these terms related to their observations.

The first build of the unit was a marble maze using Lego bricks. A Lego plate is, of course, covered with bumps which effects how the marble rolls. This gave us the opportunity to talk about friction and how a rough surface is not as good for rolling objects. What I have ended up loving most about this part of the unit is how creative the students were with their mazes. I saw mazes not just with dead ends, but traps that it was impossible to escape. There were tunnels and bridges. Some mazes had checkpoints that had to be reached in a certain order. Several had the kind of elaborate back stories that second graders specialize in telling. Sure, they learned about the pull of gravity and how the walls push back on the marble to stop it or change its direction, but the creative expression was the biggest win.

The second build brought us back to cardboard box lids and straws as we shifted to making marble runs instead of mazes. The first time through this part I learned the distinction between a "maze" and a "run" was not clear to a number of students. This became evident as the first batch of attempts had dead ends that prevented the marble from reaching the bottom of the box. A bit of explanation and the added constraint that their runs could not have straws that the marble does not touch, and the results improved dramatically. Students were challenged to make runs that used a certain number of straws and that took certain amounts of time to complete the course. I have been really impressed by how the students problem solved for the different design requirements.

There are definitely some things I would adjust about this unit, like additional building materials, surfaces, and marble sizes in order to more deeply examine the effects they have on the outcomes observed. Overall though I am fairly pleased with how this went and I look forwards to its next iteration.