As a kid, Legos were much more interesting than Duplos: at the smaller
scale you could build much more complex things. Until Nora is older,
however, we’re back to Duplos. Julia recently got a set of
Duplo-compatible marble run pieces [1], however, which have been a lot
of fun. They stay together better than the wooden
marble runs, and offer a lot more potential combinations than the
tubular
plastic ones.
While the special-purpose pieces are great, a lot of the fun has been
in figuring out how to misuse them, or in adapting normal Duplos.
Here’s something I built yesterday that shows some of this:
For example, it starts with two straight marble pieces, intended to be
flat but that can be
convinced to sit at a steep angle:
Later it sends the marble through a bunch of pairs of smooth curved
normal pieces:
It can also run along the tops of railing pairs, which even lets you
do diagonals:
We also have a pair of slides from a playground kit, which are tricky
to use well because the ball goes so fast. Here I’ve cheated a bit by
having the ball slow way down when it hits the piece at the end of the
slide; much better to do a little drop and keep that speed, if you can
use it well:
I made an overly dramatic slow-motion video of it, set to one of the
draft tracks from the live album Cecilia and I are Kickstarting:
[1] Something like this. The
main downside is that the marble is a chokeable, but it’s much easier
to keep one small object away from the baby than a large set of small
objects. And after each use we can put the marble away out of reach
even if we’re not cleaning up everything else yet.
Duploish Marble Runs
Link post
As a kid, Legos were much more interesting than Duplos: at the smaller scale you could build much more complex things. Until Nora is older, however, we’re back to Duplos. Julia recently got a set of Duplo-compatible marble run pieces [1], however, which have been a lot of fun. They stay together better than the wooden marble runs, and offer a lot more potential combinations than the tubular plastic ones.
While the special-purpose pieces are great, a lot of the fun has been in figuring out how to misuse them, or in adapting normal Duplos. Here’s something I built yesterday that shows some of this:
For example, it starts with two straight marble pieces, intended to be flat but that can be convinced to sit at a steep angle:
Later it sends the marble through a bunch of pairs of smooth curved normal pieces:
It can also run along the tops of railing pairs, which even lets you do diagonals:
We also have a pair of slides from a playground kit, which are tricky to use well because the ball goes so fast. Here I’ve cheated a bit by having the ball slow way down when it hits the piece at the end of the slide; much better to do a little drop and keep that speed, if you can use it well:
I made an overly dramatic slow-motion video of it, set to one of the draft tracks from the live album Cecilia and I are Kickstarting:
[1] Something like this. The main downside is that the marble is a chokeable, but it’s much easier to keep one small object away from the baby than a large set of small objects. And after each use we can put the marble away out of reach even if we’re not cleaning up everything else yet.