Children were most drawn to using the magnets to move the marbles inside of the box. They were curious as to what can be accomplished (moving marbles up the walls, down ramps, if they could get multiple marbles together, etc.). However, our prototype so far is still too difficult for most kids to stay engaged for long. We noticed that many children lost interest after being unable to move the marbles a certain way, and gave up very quickly. This made us realize that we should probably figure out a way to tone down the difficulty in our project and make it more accessible and easy to play with for younger kids.

We also saw that children were most interested in the parts of the box that had clearly defined goals/structure for play (i.e. almost every child attempted at some point to get to the middle of the maze, and many of them wanted to try to get their marble into the wheel system). Even when performing seemingly unstructured tasks like trying to move the marbles up the walls, many of the children were aiming for the an end goal of either dropping the marble or getting it as high as possible. Thus, it may be helpful for us to include many modules that easily provide some sort of sensory feedback so that the children can define a wider array of goals for themselves.

In terms of technical limitations, we noticed that the biggest one was how kids were having trouble seeing where their magnets are in order to move the marble that they want. Their arms are also too short to reach all the way across the box. The power of the magnets are sometimes also too weak because of the thickness of the wood between the magnets and the marbles.

Moving forward, we’ve decided that for the overall box:

  • Base and walls should be made with 3mm acrylic (except the wall for motorized mechanisms) so that the children can see where their magnets are and the magnet’s magnetism have less material to go through and would therefore be stronger.
  • Box overall should have more “length” and less “width”, or be separated into different compartments to accommodate for the shorter arm lengths of children.
  • Things should be directly tab slotted to the base/walls to decrease the number of layers the magnets need to go through. 

For our wall with wire and tabs 

  • Each wall tab should have holes on both ends so wire can connect them all together 
  • Consider sideways/slanted tabs and tabs that are wider (aka more variation) 

Possible improvements we are currently considering:

  • Adding textural elements
  • Sectioning off the base so that the marbles can’t end up all stuck in one location
  • Adding a mechanism to the corners/edges to make transferring marbles from the ground to the walls easier