Roller Coaster Lab

Peace Physics Students Stay on Track

Erika Harris, Rebeca Valencia and Amy Kukulka continue to build their roller coaster with tape, toothpicks and tubing with the hope that a marble will be able to make it through the loop without falling off track. After several trials and a rearranging of the track angles and height, the marble successfully completed the course.

Burbank, IL – February 25, 2008 –“Let’s concentrate on the second loop for now. We need to make it higher so the marble goes faster. Tilt it this way. No, that way. What if we…well one thing is for sure here. We need to secure the tracks with toothpicks,” a group of Queen Peace physics students discussed.

On a cold, blustery February morning, the last thing on most people’s minds is the thrill of summer theme parks. Not so for the frosh students in Ms. Vanessa Troiani’s Conceptual Physics course who attempted to construct the most adventurous, creative, working models of roller coasters out of foam tubing, toothpicks and tape.

This hands-on, four-day lab is meant to show students the differences between potential and kinetic energy. When the coasters are complete, students will use a marble to test their tracks, which will demonstrate how mass and height affect the potential energy of an object.

“The lesson engages students in hands-on, minds-on activities. Giving students situations to relate energy concepts to real-world activities through modeling enhances their successes in identifying, controlling and analyzing factors that affect the nature and transformation of energy associated with everyday objects,” Troiani noted.

After several failed attempts to get their marble to remain on the track, one group had a breakthrough. “Remember the video we watched in class?” Bobbi Benegas asked her group. Taking out her handy laptop and pulling up the video for the group to view, she showed them that an object – whether that be a car carrying people on a real roller coaster or a marble on the track – needs an increase of speed to make it fully around an upside-down loop without falling off.

“Different objects have different masses and so need differing speeds to make it through. To get this marble through the loops, we need to increase its speed. To do that, we need to raise the height of the marble’s starting position,” group member Erika Harris noted.


“What’s great about this lab is the other kinds of skills the girls are learning. They are working as a group, understanding the importance of teamwork and letting everyone speak their own ideas. They are seeing that the project will not be completed and will not be the best it can be without input and ideas from everyone. They are strengthening critical thinking skills by blending creativity and originality with the scientific principle of the conservation of energy,” Troiani stated.

For the group who needed increased height for a speedier marble, success finally greeted them. As the marble ran its course, stayed on track, and finished its ride successfully, the same could be said for this group, who with teamwork, creativity, various trials and errors, and the ingenuity to recall previous lessons, stayed on track and completed the lab.

By focusing on relative sizes of loops and length, the different heights of the track throughout the coaster, and the mass of the marble, groups effectively engineered mini roller coasters.

The Conceptual Physics course at Queen of Peace is a hands-on lab course dealing with introductory topics in mechanics, heat, sound and light, and electricity and magnetism. Activities and laboratories are performed on such topics as acceleration, vectors, pressure, optics and electronics. This course sets the groundwork for concepts studied in biology, chemistry and college preparatory physics classes. Each student maintains a portfolio of her best lab work, observations and designs, and research.

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