A marble rolls down a ramp constructed from cardboard and plastic tubing. Twenty-two pairs of eyes stare with rapt attention as the marble veers across the gym floor. Silence prevails until the marble halts its journey and cheers break out. Are students shooting their precious cat's-eyes during an after-school activity? No, it’s the Marble Roll—the first Online Science-athon event being funded and developed by TERC's Center for Teaching, Learning, and School Partnerships.

During the fall of 1999, students from several Alliance Schools participated in the Marble Roll field test. They joined students from Easton, Maine to Nome, Alaska, and as far south as the U.S. Virgin Islands in designing ramps to see how far they could roll a marble without giving it a push. In the words of one Alliance teacher, "The challenge was essentially a lesson in basic physics. The children learned about motion, friction, slope, and gravity."

What is the Online Science-athon? Children are natural discoverers and interested in other children. The Science-athon capitalizes on what comes naturally. It challenges children to be explorers of the world around them and connects children to one another. In so doing, it offers elementary and middle-school students opportunities to discover the science in their daily lives.

The goals of the Science-athon are simple: to be engaging and fun, easy for teachers to integrate into their teaching, and instructive. As they evolve, Science-athon events will chal lenge children to explore their world from many perspectives. Some challenges will be seasonal, some will be keyed to events like Earth Day, and others will be generic in nature. Challenges may be repeated from year to year or offered only once. Some will relate to life science, others to earth science, and still others to physical science. Yet common to all is their delivery from the Science-athon web site and the production of student-generated data that is submitted and displayed on the site as tables, maps, and graphs.

The CLEO tool for data sharing—originally developed at TERC as part of the Collaborative Learning Environments Online (CLEO) initiative—has been enhanced to support Science-athon activities. The tool offers participants a streamlined web-based mechanism for data submission and analysis. The data for an event can be viewed as one large table, or it can be viewed in smaller pieces by grade, state, or grade and state. As students submit information, graphs of the data display automatically. These features enable children to see their data in relation to that of others and to look for patterns and relationships as they probe their own questions.

Major activities for the Marble Roll included designing and building ramps using any material kids wanted as long as it met the design criteria of being one meter in length. Groups experimented with a variety of materials, including PVC pipe, wooden slats, coat hangers, waxed paper, and cardboard, as they tried to figure out how to get the longest distance. Students used their knowledge of physics to solve the design problem. Remarks such as the following could be overheard as they worked: "You need to have the best height for the marble. Raising the ramp gives it more force as it rolls down. But it can have too much height and bounce."

On Marble Roll Day, each group explained its ramp design, then held a standard glass marble at any place on the ramp, let it go without pushing or throwing it, and measured and recorded the distance rolled. They also recorded factors that could influence the distance such as the texture of the rolling surface and ramp and the height from which the marble was released. Afterwards, data were entered and submitted to the Marble Roll database for display and analysis. The entire sequence took about 10 to 12 hours of class time and engaged the talents and interest of many adults. Parents became actively involved as groups worked on their designs at home or after school. Principals, other teachers, parents, and grandparents helped out or joined the audience on Marble Roll Day.

Ted Ducas, the challenge scientist and a professor of physics at Wellesley College, wrote and illustrated material about motion, energy, and friction for the Marble Roll. Sharing his knowledge and expertise helped teachers to integrate physics concepts and technological design into their teaching and to guide students as they worked. Ted also visited a number of classes and discussed students’ designs with them. One student commented to him, "I tried a number of different designs. The first one was really steep, but then I realized if it was too steep this would cause the marble to roll off course. Finally I got the right angle to allow the marble just to roll."

Assessment strategies included observation of how students approached the challenge, worked as a team, and resolved issues. Some teachers incorporated presentations to which they invited parents, the principal, or other classes. They had students show their ramps and explain what they had done and what they found. Others assessed students’ learning by determining how closely their designs matched their hypotheses. They also had students analyze the outcomes of their designs and improve them based on their findings. Teachers observed that girls and boys were equally excited about doing the Marble Roll.

Catching Sunshine—the second Science-athon challenge—was launched in May. An extension of this year's Earth Day theme of energy, it will run to the end of June and challenge students to design and build a solar collector that raises the air temperature inside it as much as possible.

A collaboration with Riverdeep Interactive Learning in Cambridge, Massachusetts, has made it possible to enhance Catching Sunshine. Riverdeep’s educational components for SimPlayer technology have been adapted to allow Science-athon participants to engage in interactive activities using graphs and maps of the data submitted. This adds to the analyses children can do with the CLEO tool. The collaboration has also resulted in a completely new Science-athon feature, the "Talk Online With a Scientist." On a specified day and time, students doing Catching Sunshine will be able to converse online with an expert in the field of solar energy by typing their questions into web-based forms and listening to or reading the scientist’s responses. Students can submit new questions for the expert to consider as the conversation progresses.

Several new challenges are under development and the Marble Roll will be revised for delivery from the Science-athon web site again next year. Check out the Science-athon at www.science-athon.terc.edu and Riverdeep’s offerings at www.riverdeep.net. If you would like to be part of the Science-athon, send a note to Judy Vesel at TERC; judy_vesel @terc. edu.