Marbleocity Marble Machine Kit

[EEVblog]

Uses every STEM buzzword under the sun:
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/2103508677/marbleocity-marble-machine-kit-a-stem-maker-experi
But it's neat

[crispy_tofu]

That looks pretty cool. Great to see they've demolished their goal by more than 4x. 

[nowlan]

Looks cool.
Dunno how customs feels about importing wood like this.
Is acrylic that much more expensive?

[AF6LJ]

I like the looks of it, it's not an erector set but that is the cool thing about it.
It is a teaching tool not a blank slate.

[edy]

That's a pretty neat kit!  It looks like a lot of fun. My only concern is that it may be a bit "fidgety" as far as assembly. The kids will enjoy putting it together.... but does it have to be perfect? Will it connect precisely enough or is there "slack" built in that could allow the marbles to fall off their tracks if things are not perfectly aligned when they are glued together?

We have another marble kit that actually has an infinite combination of options available. You build it out of several different types of pieces (like LEGO) that cause the balls to go different ways. It is called Q-BA-MAZE 2.0 and you can see the video of it in action here:



You can make lots of different combinations of pieces and build large mazes. The nice thing is there are "splitter" and "combiner" blocks so you can put them together in ways that you do not know where the marble will go... It has a 50/50 chance of going down one path or another. So you can create systems that the kids can learn about probability by seeing where the marbles tend to drop to (like the Plinko game).

[theatrus]

Looks cool.
Dunno how customs feels about importing wood like this.
Is acrylic that much more expensive?

Acrylic is several (3-6x) times the cost of BB grade interior plywood.

[pickle9000]

Matthias Wandel marble master

[mikerj]

I love marble machines as much as the next nerd, and they clearly encourage development of manual skills and thinking.  However I have doubts that assembling a ready made kit is going to be useful STEM learning.

[snoopy]

A bit like that Mouse Trap game you had as a kid where you were more interested in the mouse trap than playing the game