Thornapple Kellogg — Tasked to design and build their own roller coaster, sixth-graders Tristyn Moore and Ethan Wilkins were tinkering around with plastic scaffolding pieces when they discovered they could build the track around Ethan’s head.
They aptly named their design “The Hat,” racing the cart down a steep hill, through two loops and across Ethan’s hair while his noggin was still nestled within the twists and turns.
It was a demonstration in physics, they explained:
“We learned about potential energy; that’s when it’s just about to go down that hill,” Tristyn said. “The kinetic energy is when it’s going down and gaining speed on the track.”
A spring-loaded launcher at the base of the first loop also gave their cart enough momentum as mass in motion.
Ethan, Tristyn and their Thornapple Kellogg Middle School classmates in teacher Martha Thorne’s physics extension class recently became architects and engineers, utilizing physics concepts to design and build their own roller coasters.
Students worked in pairs to draft designs, troubleshoot and then construct their coasters out of plastic scaffolding pieces, lengths of track and the cart. The lesson provided several opportunities to apply the physics of force, motion and energy.
This is the second year Thorne’s sixth-graders have applied building coasters to lessons about physics.
Figuring out how to gather enough kinetic energy for the cart to complete both loops was their biggest challenge, Tristyn said.
“We learned you have to do troubleshooting, because you have to figure out which part of it’s not working,” he explained. “You can’t just give up because of one problem.”
Another duo faced the problem of their tall coaster’s stability after launching the cart.
“We started adding more stabilizer pieces because the track we built started shaking,” Jayden Leonard said.
The class practiced transforming types of energy with a design challenge before completing their final coaster-building challenge.
“We had to design a roller coaster with at least two spirals and a corkscrew,” sixth-grader Ella Caskey explained.
Teammate McKenzie Heckman shared more about what they learned from building their coaster.
“The more steep the hill is, the more speed you will gain,” she said. “If it has an uphill, gravity pulls it down and slows its momentum.”
With only so much building material to go around, Ella and McKenzie had to get creative with the end of the coaster’s track because they were running out of pieces.
“We couldn’t just end it. We wanted it to be a full hill at the end, so we used the pieces we had to make a stopper we called ‘the tree of doom,’” Ella said.
Thorne said her students thrive in the class and are really engaged in the lessons.
“They enjoy the fact that they can design their own coaster and like the challenge of trying to incorporate all they can into it, in the given time frame,” she said. “Each group is different and finds different aspects of building to bring to the table.”
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