Mechanisms are fascinating, and extremely important to our world, from power stations to electric toothbrushes. You may want to build a complicated machine or just make some gears turn, or anything in between. Allowing you to learn about mechanisms as you play.
It is based around magnetic hubs which hold gears and pulleys in between them.
The ball run consists of a steel sheet, that you can use magnets to attach various tubes gullies and other devices for the ball to run down
To get the ball back up to the top there are a series of blowers set back into the wall (so you can bridge over them with the tubes and build even more complex ball runs).
Our version uses ping pong balls that can be blown up tubes, and then controlled on their way down by channels, that stick to a steel wall.
It has been incredibly successful, and will fascinate 2 year olds, PhD engineers, and everyone in between. Fans in the tubes blow the balls back up to the top which gives an immediate task - to make the balls keep circulating. Doing this once is quite easy, doing it reliably is much more difficult, and involves using trial, improvement, and empirical learning, all vital for real engineering.
This is our latest version