Coaster Lab: Teacher Manual

1. The first ten minutes

Open the tool. A coaster is already on screen, and it is not a demo — every glowing sphere on the track is a node the student can move. That matters for the first instruction you give: this is your coaster, not a video.

The fastest honest first lesson is one loop of the cycle:

1. Press Space (or ▶ Test run). The train runs the circuit. The HUD along the bottom shows speed, height, seat g, side g, a G-map, and an energy bar splitting kinetic, potential and heat.
2. Ask one question before touching anything: "where was the train fastest, and why there?" Students will point at the bottom of the first drop. The energy bar is the argument: the blue kinetic band is widest exactly there.
3. Change one thing. Click a node on the first hill, drag it higher, or use the Height slider in the Build panel. Run it again.
4. Read the change. Taller hill, faster valley, higher seat g. The Report tab now holds telemetry for both runs.

If your class is new to the tool, press Start simple in the Build panel first. It loads a plain oval with no loop, so the first change a student makes is visible in one glance.

Students who prefer a guided path can press Begin guided build, which walks the same cycle one step at a time and keeps a notebook of what they changed and what happened.

2. Explore or Engineer: choosing the level

The Certify panel has two modes, and this is the most important setting in the tool for matching it to a class.

Two details worth knowing. First, a match is not a score in Explore mode — the tool says so on screen, deliberately, because a student whose prediction was wrong and who can explain why has done the better work. Second, Engineer mode's inspection runs with friction off, so conservation of energy holds exactly and a correct calculation is genuinely correct. Ordinary test runs keep friction on.

Explore mode also asks two questions that transfer off the screen: which restraint this ride needs, and which row gets pulled hardest out of its seat. Both are answered from the student's own design, not from a lookup table.

3. A tour of the four panels

The left side carries four tabs. Students will live in Build; the learning tends to land in Report.

Build

Select a glowing node and it becomes editable: drag it across the ground, Shift-drag to change height, or use the X, Z, Height and Bank sliders. The Nudge selector (0.5 m fine / 2 m normal / 5 m coarse) gives keyboard and switch users the same precision a mouse drag gives, and the X± / Z± buttons move the selected node by that amount.

Below that, Build with pieces inserts whole editable elements — hill, drop, left turn, right turn, and a ten-node vertical loop — into the segment after the selected node. Every node of an inserted piece stays editable, so a loop is a starting shape rather than a black box.

Other controls in Build worth naming for students:

• 🎲 Generate a coaster builds a complete new circuit from a number: ground plan, lift, hills sized to an energy budget, turns banked from the physics. Type the same number and everyone gets the same coaster, which is how you get a whole class analysing one design.
• Design preflight coach flags geometry problems with numbered markers on the track — a hill the train cannot clear, track dipping into the ground, nodes too close together. It is a revision prompt, not a grade.
• Propulsion: ⛓ chain lift (releases the train at the first crest at 3.5 m/s) or ⚡ LSM launch with an adjustable thrust.
• Your train: 3 to 8 cars. This is not cosmetic — see Ride & Solve.
• Export / Import copies the design as text to paste to a classmate, and Lab packet bundles the design, notebook, conditions, challenge and latest measured evidence.

Certify

Where predictions are filed and the inspection is run. The checkpoints are marked on the track as A (first crest), B (valley), C (loop apex) and D (the turn the student flagged with ⚑ Certify this turn). Students can flag whichever turn they want the problems to ask about.

Report

The richest panel, and the one to send students to when they say the ride "felt fine." It holds:

• Rider safety — which restraint the measured forces demand (simple lap bar, ratcheting lap bar plus belt, or over-the-shoulder harness), how hard it has to hold a rider, and why real parks post a height requirement.
• Telemetry traces of the run, and a CSV download so a class can graph the data in a spreadsheet.
• An on-ride photo taken at a checkpoint, framed on the middle of the train — the riders' arms and posture in it are driven by the actual forces.
• Park economics: excitement, intensity, nausea, ticket price and daily riders, for a cross-curricular angle.

Missions

Engineering challenges graded automatically from the telemetry of a real run. Fifteen missions ship with the tool, from First ride (complete a full circuit) through Floater (at least three seconds of airtime in one clean run) to Even keel; the panel counts your progress out of fifteen. Finish a run and any mission the design satisfied is stamped. A separate, shorter set of three guided design challenges — build a smooth 20 m hill, create 3 seconds of airtime, finish below 4.0 vertical g — sits in the Build panel under Designer workbench, where it steers the preflight coach as you build. The panel also offers 📋 Copy student summary as plain text and 🎫 Save ride card, an image of the coaster with its vitals to hand in.

4. Three classroom walkthroughs

A. Energy transfer in one class period (Explore, grades 6–8)

1. Everyone presses Start simple, then 🎲 Generate with the same number written on the board. One coaster, whole class.
2. In Certify, switch to 🔍 Explore and file all three hypotheses. Students must commit before running — the tool will not accept a run until they do.
3. Run it. Open Report and find the energy bar at the moment of peak speed.
4. Discussion: the total bar does not grow. Height is traded for speed and some is lost to heat. Ask where the heat came from, then have students re-run with Friction toggled off and compare.
5. Each student writes the claim–evidence–reasoning the Explore panel prompts for, and presses Save explanation & complete cycle.

B. Circular motion with real numbers (Engineer, grades 9–12)

1. Students build or load a coaster with a loop, then press ⚑ Certify this turn on a banked turn they choose.
2. Switch to 📐 Engineer. Calculate the flagged values by hand — speed at the valley from conservation of energy, seat g from v²/r — and enter them.
3. Check predictions, then 🎢 Run inspection. The inspection is frictionless, so a correct calculation matches.
4. Where it does not match, the productive question is almost always "what radius did you use?" Turn on the Curvature heatmap in the View selector and the track shows its own radius.
5. Extension: the Report's rider-safety card states the restraint the forces demand. Ask students to redesign for the same thrill with a simpler restraint.

C. Design challenge as assessment (either mode)

1. Assign one of the three guided design challenges from the Designer workbench in the Build panel — "create 3 seconds of airtime" is the one students argue about most productively. (The Missions panel grades the matching mission, Floater, from the telemetry of a real run.)
2. Require a prediction before each test run. The guided notebook keeps the log automatically if they use Begin guided build.
3. Students submit the Lab packet or the ride card. Both carry the measured evidence, so you are grading the reasoning, not whether they got lucky.
4. Because the mission is graded from telemetry, a design that almost works is visible: students can see how close they came and iterate.

5. Ride & Solve, and the row that matters

🧠 Ride & Solve (or R) rides the coaster onboard and freezes at each checkpoint with a question the student answers before the train continues. Two selectors in the top bar control what it asks:

• Topic: coaster physics, addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, mixed math, physics and math alternating, or — only where an AI provider is configured — any subject you type.
• Grade: auto, K–2, 3–5, 6–8, or 9–12. The math questions are built from the actual numbers of the student's own ride: the height they are falling from, the metres left in the lap, the seats in their train.

The arithmetic topics are the reason this tool appears in more than physics. A fifth-grade class can ride a coaster they designed and do division about it. Nothing in Ride & Solve requires AI; the AI topic is one option among eight, and the tool labels it so.

The row selector — front, middle, back — is a genuine physics control, not a camera preference. A real train is a length, not a point: the back row crosses a crest while the front is already descending, so the rows do not feel the same ride. Have two students ride the same design in different rows and compare their seat-g traces. The Report's row-by-row model shows why.

6. What students can hand in

Everything is generated on the device and handed over by the student. The tool does not submit work anywhere on its own.

7. What the model does and does not claim

Be straight with students about this, because it is itself a science lesson.

What it models honestly. Conservation of energy along the track, speed from height, seat and lateral g from track curvature and banking, rolling resistance and quadratic air drag when friction is on, a train as a real length with per-row forces, and the restraint class those forces would demand.

What it does not do. The preflight coach is an educational geometry and ideal-dynamics preview, not structural approval — the tool says so on the panel. It does not do stress analysis on the steel, wind loading, wheel wear, or anything that would let a student claim a design is safe to build. "Passing the inspection" means the student's mathematics agreed with the model's mathematics under stated ideal conditions.

That distinction is worth one minute of class time. A model that agrees with you is not the same as a ride that is safe, and a student who can say why has learned something about modelling that transfers well beyond coasters.

8. Accessibility, motion, and slower devices

• Motion sensitivity. Motion: Standard toggles to Steady, which reduces camera shake, pulses and decorative motion. The tool also respects the operating system's own reduced-motion setting automatically. For a student who should not watch a moving ride at all, Steady mode plus the ride-position slider lets them inspect the whole run without autoplay.
• Keyboard and switch access. Every node edit has a button as well as a drag: Previous/Next node, X±, Z±, the Nudge size selector, and arrow keys on every slider. The four panels are a proper tab list.
• Slower devices. FX: Full toggles to Lite, which drops shadows and trees. If a Chromebook struggles, this is the first switch to flip.
• Colour. The g-meters pair colour with a printed number, and the heatmap legend states its range in units, so no reading depends on hue alone.
• Views for discussion. Top view, Side view, Fit coaster and Bold track make the design legible on a projector. Side view is the one for comparing hill heights with a class.

9. When something looks wrong

The train rolls backwards partway up a hill.

That is the model working. The chain lift fixes an energy ceiling at the first crest; every hill after it must be paid for out of that budget. Lower the hill or raise the lift. The banner says which.

A student says the inspection is "wrong."

Check two things: that they used the radius of the flagged turn (the curvature heatmap shows it), and that they compared against an inspection run rather than a friction-on test run.

The ride feels different in the back row.

Correct, and intentional. See section 5.

There is no AI hint button.

Expected when no AI provider is configured — which is the normal state for student devices in many districts. Everything in this manual works without it.

The design preflight coach flags a ride the student likes.

Treat the numbered markers as revision prompts. A flagged design still runs; the coach is telling the student where a rider would be hurt or the train would fail, and "I chose to keep it because…" is a legitimate, gradeable answer.

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