Mountain Discovery Charter School has 10 design principles in which the students and staff refer to throughout the year.  During some much deserved down time the 7th grade students became actively engaged in the design principle “The Having of Wonderful Ideas.”  Using materials and game pieces that the students found in the classroom (yard sticks, meter sticks, dominoes, Jenga pieces and Uno Stacko pieces) they created a “snake” 18 feet long.  They tested it several times with many successful runs.  While they were working they came up with the ideas of putting their accomplishment in the newspaper, calculating the speed at which it traveled, planning a school wide competition, how to make it more complex and finding the world record.  They recorded the time it took for the pieces to fall from start to finish and measured the distance it traveled.  Using these measurements and their knowledge of measurement and proportions they calculated that their snake traveled at a speed of approximately 2 mph.

Here is a video of the "snake" at work.