Lesson Plan Overview
Lesson 1
Pinball Wizards
Students begin to explore the basic building blocks of a homemade pinball
machine: a launch ramp, a pinball, and an inclined playing field. In an
unstructured environment, students explore these elements to see what happens
when they are combined.
Lesson 2
Launch Ramps
In this activity, students change variables of the launch ramp to see how they
affect the behavior of the ball. They make careful observations about the path
the ball travels and try to compare how the ball travels when it is launched from
different ramp configurations.
Lesson 3
Playing Pinball
In this activity, students explore toy pinball games to see how they function.
They observe the numbers and types of targets on the playfield and play the
games to see how hard it is to hit certain targets.
Lesson 4
Walls Get In My Way
Students place a wall on their playfield and note how they need to adapt their
launches to avoid the wall. They explore how the wall affects the places that the
pinball can travel and determine if there are areas on the playfield that are
difficult or impossible to reach.
Lesson 5
Trying Targets
In this activity, students begin to lay out their own pinball playfields. They try to
determine where the targets should be placed on their observations about where
the pinball can be easily targeted and where the more difficult areas to hit are.
As students conduct their investigations, they refer back to their science
notebooks.
Lesson 6
Scoring Points
In this activity, students continue to lay out their own pinball playfields. They try
to determine where additional targets should be placed based on their
observations about where the pinball can be easily targeted and where the more
difficult areas to hit are. They will assign scores to targets based on how hard or
easy they are to hit.
Lesson 7
Banging Bumpers
In this activity, students add bumpers to their playfields. They consider how
adding the bumpers change the way the pinball rolls on the playfield.
Lesson 8
Build Your Own!
In this activity, students use the knowledge they’ve gained over the course of the
challenge to finish designing their pinball game to meet the criteria set out by
EarthToy Designs. In teams, students test and optimize their game. They
present the games to the rest of the class and discuss why they built them the
way they did.