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← Summer Solo-Science

Rainy-day bonusReleases June 22

Bonus: debug it

A rainy-day brain workout — fix a 'broken' marble run or circuit by hunting down the one thing that's wrong.

For you to do

Take something you built (a marble run, the saltwater battery, a folded bridge) and deliberately 'break' it — or fix one that already misbehaves. Your job is to find the ONE real reason it's failing.

Grown-up help

All on your own — this one is pure puzzle.

Hunt the cause

  1. Describe exactly what's wrong ('the marble stops at the second curve').
  2. Make ONE change and test. Did it help? Write it down either way.
  3. Keep going. Resist fixing five things at once — you won't know which one mattered.

What's happening

Push further

Write a one-line 'bug report' for your fix: what was wrong, what you tried, and the real cause you found.

This is **debugging**: the failure you SEE (marble stops) is usually not the **root cause** (the ramp is too flat there). Changing one thing at a time — **iteration** — is how engineers, coders, and scientists track a problem to its real source.