Sunday, February 27, 2011

Rube Goldberg Competition

We spent all Saturday morning with Brian's 5th grade class at a Rube Goldberg competition. If you aren't familiar with the concept of a Rube Goldberg machine, it is a complex device with numerous steps which performs a simple task. If you played the Mousetrap board game, you've assembled a Rube Goldberg-type machine.

My son's class has been working on this machine for over a month and all the hard work of designing, testing, re-designing, re-testing, writing a technical report, designing brochures, T-shirts, and posters culminated in the local competition where they competed against 5 other machines.

The purpose - create a machine to open the cover and the first page of a book. The machine must also be designed around a theme, complete with a backstory.

Our class decided on a Medieval theme and built it as a large Castle, complete with moat, dragon, princess and brave prince. The machine itself used ramps, dominos, levers, a pendulum and a mouse trap to open the book and turn the page.

Steps 3, 4, 5, 6

Setting Up the Machine



The competition included a Junk Wars theme:
Junk Yard Competition

And Alice in Wonderland:
Alice In Wonderland Theme
The remaining competitors: the Illini team, The Beach Team and The Jungle Team.

Here the kids are setting up right before their performance and judging:
Set up for Judging

The coolest part of the project - everyone in the class participated in the presentation. That's 24 kids to manage and herd!

Here's a quick clip of the machine in action - it goes fast, so pay attention.


The best part? The machine worked during the competition and our team won first place! Now they advance to the Regional competition in two weeks.

No comments:

Post a Comment