Marble Roller Coaster

This is a rough outline for a Wonderland module designed to be both fun and teach a number of physics concepts, including potential and kinetic energy.

The idea is to allow users to build simple marble roller coasters from a "kit" of several parts (ramp, loop, hill) and then race marbles down the track. Here are what the pieces in the kit might look like, although hopefully much more attractive than this.

Users should be able to vary parameters including ball mass, friction of ramp surface material, gravity, angle of ramp, size of loop, size of hill, etc. The roller coaster simulation on the Funderstanding web site provides a good starting point for selecting parameters:

What's interesting about this simulation is that the coaster falls off the track if the speed is too fast or the track is too steep. This gives great visual feedback that your selection of parameters did not work well and adds some fun to the interaction.

While playing around with building coasters and changing parameters may be engaging, we want to ensure that there is always an activity to do with the marble coaster. The coaster interaction should include a series of "challenges" that users can work on independently or in groups. For example, a challenge might be something like "What's the minimum length of the ramp in order for the ball to make it through a loop of this size?"

Here the mass of the ball, friction, and gravity would all have to be held constant. The user can only vary the length of the ramp. Another example of a challenge might be: "What's the largest size loop that will work, given this particular ramp?"

In terms of multi-user interaction, users should be able to race marbles down different lanes of the same coaster:

Or they should be able to build their own coaster in response to a challenge and see how they do against other people's coasters. We can use security to hide coasters under construction to keep them secret until the participants are ready to reveal their designs and race against one another. To make this interesting, the challenge would have to be something like: "Using only x meters of track, make the fastest possible coaster."

Other Potential Features

There are many possible features that could be included in this project. Here are a few potential feature ideas:

• A "ball cam" so that you get the effect of riding on the coaster
• Even better, have the avatars be able to actually ride on the coaster
• Visualizations (friction, potential, kinetic energy, etc.)
• Replay the action (instant replays, slow motion replays, replays with visualization, replays controlled by a slider)

References and On-line Resources

Open Source Physics - Includes open source Java code as well as a Roller Coaster Energy Model Lesson Plan

Funderstanding - Coaster - Very nice 2D simulation with lot's of parameters to tweak. The coaster does things like fall off track if hill is too high or speed too fast. The site also includes short explanations of physics concepts like energy, acceleration, etc.

Design a Roller Coaster - Entirely 2D and non-interactive but includes interesting challenge to pass a "safety inspection" with explanations of why your solution isn't a good one if the inspection fails

Energy Skate Park from PhET Physics - Shows series of 2D visualizations of potential and kinetic energy

Roller Coaster Physics - Java applet - authors permit "remixing" and include a number of different 2D visualizations

MyPhysicsLab - RollerCoaster - Remix of Roller Coaster Physics

Fast Vertical Roller Coaster Building (video) - Video that shows a UI for building a roller coaster. It doesn't say the program used, but I'm guessing it's Roller Coaster Tycoon

Roller Coaster Physics - VERY Simple animation showing where the physics concepts come into play

How Roller Coasters Work (video) - Just a video talking about basic principles. The same site also has a simple animation

Roller Coaster Physics - Fairly short, simple textual explanation of the science behind roller coasters

Roller Coaster History - Historical information