Energy and Roller Coasters

I was so excited when I saw Sarah blog in MathEqualsLove about Marble Roller Coasters in her Physical Science class. I knew when we got to potential and kinetic energy we had to do this. Just yesterday we did this in class. The exclamations of the students helped me to know that this lab was a big hit.

The class was split into groups of two and each group was given 2 insulation tubes that were cut in half, so they had a total of 7.2 meters of roller coaster track. Each group was also given 1 marble, a roll of masking tape, and three pieces of duct tape (to tape the ends of the track together).

Before the lab, I did some searching online for idea of parameters to give to the students and what to ask them to do in their notebooks. Here is one document I found, but most of my ideas came from this lab.

Most of the pairs worked on this for a solid 60 minutes and a few groups would have been happy to have a little more time.

Here is the direction sheet that I provided for each group. And this is the lab sheet that they were given to put into their notebooks.