LEGO Marble Run Program

Hanna Collins is the Youth Services Librarian at Slinger Community Library. 

We recently held a family program at our small library that was a great success! One Saturday a month we host a family-style program at the library. All ages can participate, and we’ve been excited to see a wide range of families, including grandparents, cousins, and friends. 

For our April program, I planned a LEGO Marble Run event. Before I began working at Slinger (and I believe before the pandemic), the library hosted LEGO programs on a semi-regular basis. Building always seems popular with kids, and I knew we already had a collection of standard LEGOs. While browsing for something more than just a basic building program, I stumbled across this Frugal Fun 4 Boys blog post. I loved the additional STEM elements of using a pool noodle as an inclined plane and observing the effect it had on the speed and distance the marble traveled.

By looking at the pictures, I could see that larger LEGO blocks would make building a lot easier. As part of the PBS Kids Learning Cohort for this year, we received a stipend to purchase materials to support programs. I needed large LEGOs for one of these programs, so this was also a great opportunity to get more use out of our new items. We ended up purchasing three PREXTEX sets from Amazon. I purchased 8 pool noodles from Dollar Tree for only about $1.25 each. They were cut in half with a box cutter, then cut into various lengths. A bag of marbles was about $6 on Amazon. 

I also gathered some other materials from our craft room. We had foam block shapes and plastic boxes of various sizes to aid in building. You could also use various recycled materials if you have them available. The morning of the program I spread materials out as evenly as I could on the floor and on tables. Thirteen families had registered on SignUp Genius. I debated having all sets on the floor, but I’m glad I set up tables because we did have grandparents who didn’t want to be on the floor and a child in a wheelchair.

I put on some happy working music and families started to stream in! There really was a wide variety of ages, including babies who just wanted to suck on a block, whole families, and a group of grandparents who just wanted to watch and encourage grandkids. Several stations had standard LEGOS, but for the most part patrons used the larger PREXTEX blocks. Creativity wasn’t lacking! One child put two pool noodle halves together to form a tunnel. Some structures were tall and some were long. There were bridges and turns, and lots of trial and error.

I traveled to each station offering support and encouragement, especially to families with younger children. I posed questions sometimes like, “how could you make the noodle more stable?” or “how could you get the marble to go faster?”. A couple kids got frustrated, including a toddler who didn’t want anyone to watch him building (I respected his wishes and steered clear!).

As an added incentive for people to attend, we had two door prizes - a LEGO Head, and a Classic Creative Suitcase. After advertising this on our Facebook and Instagram pages a couple weeks before, our registration definitely went up!

Overall, the program went great! Families were happy apart from some minor meltdowns of little ones. I did use one other staff member to assist with set-up and take-down, which only took about fifteen minutes. Our final count was 35 participants, which was a great turnout for a family event for our library.