Marble Drop

I made this marble drop by myself, receiving no help or advice from anyone else. My theme for the marble drop was one of nature and more specifically, water in nature. I came up with this theme because it is very, broad, and can be related to by anyone. The marble rolling down the track represents water or a rain drop. It runs down a mountain, through a forest, through a cave, over a plain, into a river, and lastly through a waterfall and into the great blue ocean. The most difficult part in making my piece was definitely the cave part. It took many tries to finally glue the popsicle sticks into the cardboard tube so that the marble could roll through it and not get stuck and even more tries to glue the actual cardboard tube onto the cardboard platform. My marble travels in a very intuitive way. It starts high up on a mountain in the top left and rolls down a series of alternating popsicle sticks where it finally pops out of a waterfall and reaches the sea at the very bottom of the marble drop. I did have to make my own tracks, and to do so, I took pairs of popsicle sticks and hot glued them together. Then after they dried, I took the glued popsicle sticks and glued them onto the cardboard platform. If I could change anything about my piece, it would be the "catches" at the start of each alternating popsicle track. These "catches" were put there to catch the marble and keep it from falling off of the track. However, during my final showcase of my marble drop, I realized that I didn't make the "catches" big enough, so the marble would occasionally fall out anyway. If I could change the catches, I would make them overly large, to prevent the marble from falling out 100% of the time. The thing that I am most proud of in my piece is probably the drawings/paintings and the appearance of it.  The drawings display my theme very clearly and I put a lot of work into painting everything. I also painted the track (popsicle sticks) to match the individual theme of each layer of the marble drop as the marble travels from one part of nature to the next.