Turing Tumble Community

Oversize board using glass marbles

I am toying with the idea of making a 2X size board and pieces so that it can use standard 16mm glass marbles. I realise that the current size of this is intended for desktop and classroom use, and to be portable and cheap to make, however scaling up the design allows for different manufacturing techniques, such as making the board from wood and using glass toy marbles.

If anyone has thought about this idea, or tried it, please get in touch!

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ruswerner–Could you elaborate on the advantages your device would have over the TT the way it exists now.–DonV

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My initial reasons for considering this approach were:

  1. to be able to use standard glass marbles which are easier to get than painted steel balls and also easier to handle due to their size
  2. Ease-of-fabrication of the board and pieces. Milling a larger board is easier due to tolerances being less of an issue.

I haven’t completely engineered my way through this, so there maybe be some showstoppers lurking about.

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I totally agree that conventional marbles are easier to handle than the ball bearings that TT currently uses. While my second graders have no trouble manipulating the ball bearings, my fourth graders prefer to use a tweezers.

I think that the larger size of the board that is necessary to accommodate glass marbles would be too cumbersome for a desktop and–together with the larger components–would be too difficult to store. Furthermore, I’m guessing that a teacher, for demonstrations, would prefer to use one of the virtual TT’s rather than a large board.

You might want to see if a market exists for your enlarged TT.

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I can see it being a tool for social distancing right now. I thought how can the Boys and Girls Club use this with social distancing and frequent wash downs. And I decided the demonstration would be the route. This is where your idea of a bigger board would be ideal. I like the physical objects and virtual but in order to study components you need physical.

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The magnetic pen to my kids alphabet game is working ok, thought the balls don’t quite hang on. It would definitely help if some sort of “handling tool” was included.

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the link below is to the marble collector that you can 3d print.

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@DonV it is interesting to hear you say that your 2nd graders manipulate the ball bearings well, but that the 4th graders prefer to use tweezers. I wouldn’t expect this! Thanks for your feedback.

A larger Turing Tumble is a great idea. We had a Children’s Museum in Ontario, Canada make a larger board, but I don’t have any information on how they went about it. I also think that they used ball bearings and not traditionally sized marbles. I know this because they asked about how to paint the ball bearings - they had used a dying method and the pigment was coming off on their hands. Here are some pictures of their display.
Mechanical Computer Signage parts signage 2 parts signage

Science North Display

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I was thinking of doing the exact same thing but only a little bigger. Possibly using billard balls instead of marbles.

I am a STEM Education Consultant and I do a lot of large group demonstrations. While a large screen is nice, the beauty of the Turing Tumble is that it takes an abstract idea and makes it tangible. I want the students to have a chance to manipulate the pieces with their hands. Also, we deal with quite a few students with fine motor issues and the pieces on the regular board would simply be too small. The bigger pieces mean everyone can have fun!

If anyone has any designs they used for their larger adaptions, or any advice to point me in the right direction, please share! I need all the help I can get!

Thanks!

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@Phillip The billiard balls would make for a really cool display. We have some large parts at home that Paul printed in hopes of using them for a display/demo board. I can ask him if he has the stl files for those still.

@alyssa That would be outstanding!

Thank you so much!

Hi Phillip, I talked to Paul about this last night and found out what made him stop progress on the giant board. He said that when you make a large version everything has to be proportionally the same size which causes it to be huge even with a slightly larger ball (like traditional glass marbles). If you are thinking of doing one with billiard balls, the board would have to be very large (over 10 feet tall). I did some measurements and came up with the following info. Our ball bearings are 7.96 mm and billiard balls are 57 mm. That means every other part would need to be 7.16 times as big. One option would be to have less repositionable places for the parts and not have it able to do quite as much. I found this video of a couple of people who made a giant Digi-Comp II. It looks like they used a 4’x8’ piece of plywood. Giant Digi-Comp II - YouTube
20210624_132137 20210624_131925

Significant scaling up is also going to run into issues with material properties - the infamous square-cube law applies immediately (if you apply a scale factor of 2 to a component and use the exact same materials, the larger component will effectively be only half as strong - it’d be four times as strong, but subject to eight times the force)

Some of that can be adjusted for by using different materials - billiard balls rather than steel bearings the same size - but my intuition is that, by the time you’re looking at boards the size of a single-storey building, you’re going to need to change the shapes of pieces to get the same functionality.

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@rmsgrey Very good points. Even when we changed the material from plastic that was CNC milled (the prototype) to the injection molded plastic (for the mass-produced games), we had to make modifications to the parts because the weight and friction were different.