Design and Build a Rube Goldberg
In this two-part activity, students design and build Rube Goldberg machines. This open-ended challenge employs the engineering design process and may have a pre-determined purpose, such as rolling a marble into a cup from a distance, or let students decide the purposes.
A Rube Goldberg contraption.Copyright Rube Goldberg™ & © of Rube Goldberg, Inc. Argonne National Laboratory http://www.anl.gov/Media_Center/Frontiers/2002/images/part2_lg.jpg
Designing and building is essential to engineering. Engineers follow the steps of the design process to help them create the best possible solutions to real-world problems. These challenges may be simple or complex and the wide variety of solutions can also cover a range of effort for the user. In general, complex designs require more effort to develop than simple ones. Rube Goldberg designs are meant to show the unnecessary complexities in machines, which sometimes result from modern technology.
After this activity, students should be able to:
- List the general steps of the engineering design process.
- Think critically about the importance of the machines they encounter in life.
- Use their knowledge of simple and compound machines to design and build a small Rube Goldberg machine.