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Ravenna's Toy University
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| The Qfwfq Cosmodrome |
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| This marble alley is dedicated to Qfwfq, the central character from Cosmicomics by Italo Calvino, the book that inspired many of the games devised by the Marble University. Test your expertise at marbles by "looping the loop". But be warned, if you push the marble too softly it will fall on its way up, too hard and it will fall off the track. Then cross your fingers that it will stop where you want at the end. |
| Primitive Pinball |
 This simple free-falling pinball game was made by soldering a series of bolts onto a metal lath. Players drop the marbles onto the top of the board letting them fall through the bolts until they stop at the bottom. Points are scored according to where the marble stop. |
| The Bernoulli Band |
 This marble alley traces an elegant figure-of-eight and is complete with a resonating string suspended between the two players. The bends plus the rising and falling track set the marbles into a perpetual race, one trying to overtake the other as they makes their way around the course. The Swiss-born mathematician Jacques Bernoulli (Basel,1654) described the above ribbon as "A figure of eight, or a knot, or the shape formed by a ribbon with two circles whose centres are on a hyperbola and each radius is equidistant from the centre." |
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