That’s what I’m talking about! Finally, a marble race where a 3-year-old can put together columns, trays, wheels, connections, stairs, and feet without being totally dependent on the adults. What’s more, it’s translucent, colorful, and absolutely beautiful. Lyons Cub still needed a lot of help, but compared to the wooden marble run, this one here gave him more autonomy and joy in the making. There were no toddler tantrums if something fell apart after applying too much pressure; we simply put it together again. Even Lion Granny and Lyoness had great fun with it! It came with its own marbles, but we had already bought a whole net full of them. You cannot have enough, since some will always escape under the furniture. The set has lots of different parts, and it really took some thinking and experimenting before we figured out where a marble would turn up in the end. The marbles are supposed to collect in a small tray in the feet of some of the columns, and not fall out of a hole somewhere that hadn’t been accounted for. The first time round, he played in a concentrated way for TWO HOURS!
Then, he disassembled the whole construct, only to have Lyoness rebuild it with him after dinner, and he poured in whole cups full of marbles, which was very loud and very exciting. We changed the layout several times. We are also going to buy one or two more sets, so we can create an even bigger artifact with more opportunities. It is so much fun to have different openings to start marbles from at the same time, just to see which one arrives first at its goal. Even if they get stuck sometimes, it’s an easy fix, and the towers don’t topple over as easily as was the case with the wooden marble run. We love this one! What a great STEM learning activity.
Lyons Cub has the marble run from Ucradle, but different companies offer almost the same product with a varying number of pieces and some color and design modifications. Actually, the most important pieces are the feet that collect the falling marbles (the Ucradle version has only 2 of those), and the Wlove design has 8 of those, so we are getting that one to extend our artifact. If you just have a straight tube or one with an ordinary foot, the marbles will fall on your floor and roll anywhere, or they’ll back up into the pipes and you have to take them out by hand (which can make your whole construct tumble). Check out and compare different versions here:
