WATERLOO -- Shaniya Bradford has figured out how to keep a marble from rolling off a series of wooden ramps stacked on blocks that zig-zag across the floor.

Numerous attempts have shown the Freeburg School first-grader where to fortify the ramps with walls of blocks as the marble drops from one ramp onto the next, changing directions each time.

Teacher Beth VanMeeteren, pointing to one of the turns, adds a further challenge: "What if I said you had to make this more sharp?"

Bradford adjusts the incline and angle of each ramp as well as the surrounding walls before sending the marble rolling again. The girl is striving to convert one of her angles from obtuse to acute -- concepts she recently learned. As other children head outside, she continues making adjustments until a working acute angle emerges on the ramp's final leg.

To accomplish this, Bradford must grasp the relationship between the slope of the ramp and the speed of the marble -- force and motion. VanMeetern doesn't explain this physics concept to her students, rather she lets them discover it through trial and error.

Encouraging students to "construct" their own understanding of the world is central to Freeburg's constructivist approach. This is done through working with the ramps and a number of other "physical knowledge activities" from cooking to bubble play.

Now the school, operated by the Regent's Center for Early Developmental Education at the University of Northern Iowa, has an opportunity to expand the ramps and pathways activities beyond its experimental setting. A four-year $1.7 million grant from the National Science Foundation will help Freeburg further develop a curriculum that can be marketed to other schools.

"There's a difference between something that will work in a lab school and something that will work out in a public school," says Betty Zan, a UNI associate professor and Regents' Center faculty member.

The National Science Foundation's expectation is "that this will be commercialized," she adds. Profits from the curriculum will be reinvested in Freeburg, which was set up collaboratively between UNI, Allen College of Nursing, Head Start and Waterloo Community Schools.

The first step in creating the curriculum is interviews of all 64 of the school's 3-year-old through second-grade students to determine their level of physical knowledge gained through ramp play. School staff also will further develop classroom activities.

In the second and third years of the grant, the curriculum will be piloted in local teachers' classrooms and then field tested. Staff will analyze the data collected from the field testing during the fourth year.

"They've asked us to develop a learning progression across all age ranges," says Professor Rheta DeVries, another Regents' Center faculty member and a pioneer in constructivism.

"Learning is really messy when you look at it happening in a way that allows children to make their own mistakes," she says. "Error is very important in the development of knowledge and intelligence.

"We think that science that tries to teach facts and the truth may end up teaching children to state a law or cite a principle, but not develop any in-depth understanding of that concept."

Zan noted they are working with a UNI physics professor on the curriculum.

"This is a wonderful collaboration for us, because we bring the expertise in early childhood and he brings the expertise in physics." Still, the ideas they want children to learn are very basic.

"We're not trying to teach them Newtonian physics," says Zan. "What we're trying to do is lay a foundation."

Contact Andrew Wind at (319) 291-1507 or andrew.wind@wcfcourier.com.