In tabletop games involving dice, it is important to ensure randomness of the dice rolls and to protect other gaming elements from being scattered by rolling dice. One way of ensuring random rolls and protecting gaming elements is to drop dice into a dice-rolling tower (“dice tower”). A dice tower is usually small (20 cm by 20 cm) and made of foam board or wood and contains various obstacles (ramps, pegs, etc.) for the dice to collide with in a confined environment. With the rising popularity of tabletop gaming and the importance of engaging students with design projects, the process of designing, building, and testing a dice tower can be the basis of various interesting physics lab activities. Here, we discuss the basics of dice tower design and construction, present the results of a few simple experiments that our students have conducted using dice towers, and outline some of the physics principles that a dice tower can be used to illustrate.
Skip Nav Destination
Article navigation
January 2019
PAPERS|
January 01 2019
Using Dice Towers in an Introductory Physics Lab
W. Brian Lane
W. Brian Lane
Jacksonville University
, Jacksonville, FL
Search for other works by this author on:
Phys. Teach. 57, 28–30 (2019)
Citation
W. Brian Lane; Using Dice Towers in an Introductory Physics Lab. Phys. Teach. 1 January 2019; 57 (1): 28–30. https://doi.org/10.1119/1.5084924
Download citation file:
Pay-Per-View Access
$40.00
Sign In
You could not be signed in. Please check your credentials and make sure you have an active account and try again.
492
Views
Citing articles via
A “Perpetual Motion Machine” Powered by Electromagnetism
Hollis Williams
Sauntering Sauropods: The Preferred Walking Speeds of the Largest Land Animals That Ever Lived
Scott A. Lee, Justyna Slowiak
Jack Reacher and the Deployment of an Airbag
Gregory A. DiLisi, Richard A. Rarick
Related Content
Variations on a simple dice game
Phys. Teach. (April 2018)
How to teach statistical thermal physics in an introductory physics course
American Journal of Physics (January 2001)
“Radio‐Active” Learning: Visual Representation of Radioactive Decay Using Dice
The Physics Teacher (January 2010)
A Simple Statistical Thermodynamics Experiment
The Physics Teacher (March 2010)
Electronic states of pseudospin-1 fermions in dice lattice ribbon
Low Temp. Phys. (December 2018)