Marble Runs, Mechanisms and AI Judges

Fun for the whole family! Whether you’re 6 or 96, you can flex your creativity to build an awesome marble run. Start with simple ramps and traps, or follow our print-and-cut plans to make marble flippers, servo-activated starting gates and even train a full-fledged AI judge to impartially tell you the winner of each race! Scroll down for all the project plans.

We teamed up with Make Magazine’s Family Maker Camp to live stream 2 sessions to get you started. Tune in to see us demonstrate building the mechanisms, adding electronics to make them move and light up. The second video also shows you how to use your webcam to train an AI to activate a second relay race when enough marbles complete the first run.

Servo-Powered Lane Changer

Servo-Powered Lane Changer

Add electronics and a micro controller to your Lane Changer to make it move at the press of a button!

Spinners

Spinners

Add some spinning traps to your Marble Run to help stir things up a bit

Train an AI Judge

Train an AI Judge

Use your webcam to train an AI judge to display the winning marble of each race!

Racing Mixer

Racing Mixer

In this easy-to-build module, you’ll create a peg board which can shuffle up marbles at the start of a race. Combine this with our Starting Gate template and find out who’s marble team is the fastest

Lane Changer

Lane Changer

Change the path of your marble with the push of a button!

Marble Lift

Marble Lift

Using the power of elastics, propel your marbles to new heights.

Peg Board

Peg Board

A large add-on for your Marble Run! Design a Peg Board to mix things up a bit, and add elastic bands to help guide marbles down a certain path

Scoring Zone

Scoring Zone

A fun ending for your Marble Run. See if you can design a scoring system to tell who wins the Marble Race

Pathways

Pathways

Build paths to connect your Marble Run modules, or even just one long, crazy pathway!

Starting Gate with Servo

Starting Gate with Servo

Using a Circuit Playground Express Micro-controller, a Servo Motor, and some basic coding skills, learn how to turn your Starting Gate Project into something more