Rube Goldberg Machine
Abstract:
We want students, mainly older middle to high school students to learn more about interactions within physics and engineering through the Rube Goldberg Machine concept. The Rube Goldberg Machine is the idea of making a simple task overly complicated through engineering. We aim to provide different types of machine concepts through instruction manuals for students to recreate and adapt to their liking. We provide details on what the purpose of the concept is, what it would do, what materials you would need, and how to construct it with some examples. This concept can be used by all ages, but we recommend having someone over 13 years old supervise all activities, with adults supervision on potential hazardous materials. Each activity can last between 1 to 3 hours on average depending on the materials needed and the level of difficulty.
Learning Goals:
We want students to learn more about the physics and engineering portion of the activity and can make adaptations to their liking. We hope to open the student’s creativity with household items to make simple tasks different. Although they won’t necessary need to calculate the mathematics pr physics behind each action, the activity can help them understand more about gravity, centripetal force, tension, law of motion and other physics components which involve kinetic and potential energy. They will learn it as they create concepts that require something dropping, spinning, flipping, interacting with other items, and so on.
Materials required:
Supplies will be based on each activity. Basic supplies required would be the booklet and the internet to see more examples or videos of the activity. Nothing needs to be manufactured necessarily as we will be using household items. Students may need to tie stuff or change the household item slightly to match the activity (tying a string, cutting some parts, etc.), but nothing that would require a manufacturing process.
Supervision Description:
The amount of supervision will depend on the activity and creativity of the student. Typically, activities can take a couple of rooms and is generally messy as we look for many different household items to use. This activity can be done by multiple participants at once at different ages. We ask that the supervisor have a basic knowledge of physics to help with some ideas that students may have. Basic physics in this case would not be different from what an adult or student would interact with on an almost daily basis.
Participant Description:
This is where you get to explore your creativity! We have some tasks in the PDF attached on some starting actions you can look at. Make brushing your teeth, feeding your dog, or cooking an egg automatic with a simple push of a playing card. You can use whatever you have in mind to do whatever you want. At the same time, you can make a mess and see things hit each other and fall. Explore the world of physics and making simple tasks fun!
PDF to download — download from title.