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So what specific forces should students be able to identify in their final roller coaster project?




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The activity can be viewed at: Build a Paper Roller Coaster

Hi there,

If your students are familiar with terms such as potential and kinetic energy, a good challenge for them would be to graph the potential vs kinetic energy of marble roller coasters that they build themselves. In terms of forces, a good start would probably be looking at gravity and friction forces, as those are the two main ones that you will encounter when building these roller coasters. But I think it would be quite valuable to look at the starting potential energy and why, for example, a marble can't overcome a bigger hill than the one it started on. Hope this helps.