Concept

We built a toy similar to popular "marble track" sets which uses water flow instead. A peg board was created which several different features can be mounted on and interconnected with pieces of tubing. The toy is designed to help develop some intuition for fluid flow. The final version would ideally have a pump to automatically recirculate the water.

Construction

The pegboard was made by laser cutting 1/8" wood. All of the water course features were made by laser cutting 1/8" clear acrylic sheets which were joined with acrylic weld and hot glue. Features are then attached to the peg board with bolts and wing nuts. The end of each course feature has a small piece of silione tubing affixed to it. Additional lengths of tube and two-ended barbed fittings are used to construct different configurations. All CAD work was done using SolidWorks. 

Design Pictures

Results

We were not able to get a pump so water was not circulated continuously. The reactor, slalom, and funnel features all functioned well, though there were some leaks, particularly around where the silicone tube was glued to the acrylic. The waterwheel did not turn easily when water was flowed through the feature.

Possible Changes

For the next interaction, we plan on creating a multi-sided pegboard stand so multiple children can play simultaneously or collaborate. In addition, a recirculating pump will be added. Instead of connecting features using silicone tubing, the features will be designed to sit on top of one another, such that leaks are much less likely. We are also still considering ways to "game-ify" our toy.

Refections

When we began designing this project, we didn't spend enough time investigating solutions to each of the problems we needed to solve. Instead, we either took the first thing that we thought would work (using standard tube fittings that turned out to be very difficult to take on and off), or we would put off that problem as something to solve later (like how to attach the tubes to the acrylic parts). While this method of problem solving did lead to a working project in a minimal amount of time, there are several aspects that could have been improved if we had thought about several different solutions before deciding on one. For example, if we had thought ahead of time about attaching the tubes to the acrylic parts, we could have worked a solution into the design of the parts, instead of just resorting to hot glue when we were assembling everything.