Purpose: Our project idea revolves around the idea of being able to “build your own” track by rearranging individual blocks. Our idea allows the children to interactively build, disassemble, and reassemble their own systems and offers them a sense of flexibility.

Experience: A typical child may scour through the set of available blocks to find a block of interest, typically one that “looks cool” to them. Let’s say that piece is the ball drop piece. A child may place a marble in the basket of the vertical conveyor belt and watch the marble be lifted to the top of the machine and dropped into the pipe. They watch the ball fall onto the rotating platform and into one of the holes on it, followed by rolling down the exit path. The child will watch the ball exit the block and roll onto the floor. 

Response: A child might think of attaching a simple piece to the exit port of the ball drop in order to continue the ball’s motion as a response. Once attached, they can watch the ball travel further than before. Eventually, the child, or multiple children, will have created a track with enough blocks that allows the ball to roll for a relatively long time. 

Technical Outline:

We will have three ‘complex’ blocks. The first is essentially a ferris wheel that will simply be rotated by a motor in the center. It will be made out of laser cut plywood since a lot of the components will be flat. The balls will queue at the bottom and be swept up by the wheel. At the top, the balls will roll off of the carrier basket onto a track that can be connected to another piece. 

Another complex block will be the ball drop. Two gears connected by a toothed belt with baskets on it will pick up the balls at the bottom and lift them up to deposit them onto a slight ramp. The ball will roll down the lamp and trigger a sensor (by raising a flag into the way of a photointerrupter) that starts spinning a wheel with many holes below. The ball will fall off the ramp onto the spinning wheel and fall into a random hole. Then it will come out the side to be attached to more track pieces. 

Finally, there will be a catapult or ball launcher block. There will be a small piece of track that drops the ball into the launching cradle; once in the launcher, a mechanical device (raising a flag into the way of a photointerrupter) will trigger the arm to swing, launching the ball a few blocks lengths away. Ideally, the kids will use a funnel piece to catch the ball. 

Some of the ‘medium’ complexity blocks include a funnel piece that can catch a launched ball or a falling ball and realign it to a track, and a spinning gear wheel on a slant that will just spin balls to the bottom. The simple track pieces will be paths for the ball to roll through to connect different more complex pieces. There will also be elevation blocks to ensure many configurations of the blocks.

The main difficulty will be ensuring that many pieces fit together with many other pieces to allow many permutations. It will also be important that each block works reliably and can structurally withstand the physical playstyle of children.