Rube Goldberg Challenge
What better way to pass time as a family than to through an at-home engineering challenge? Recently, Whittle school families participated in a Rube Goldberg challenge in creating a “chain-reaction” obstacle course. To learn more about the challenge and try it as a family, read below!
WHO WAS RUBE GOLDBERG?
Rube Goldberg was an American cartoonist, sculptor, engineer, author, and inventor born in California in the 1880s. He graduated from UC Berkeley in 1904 with an engineering degree. Before joining the San Francisco Chronicle as a sports cartoonist, he worked as an engineer. Later he transferred to the San Francisco Bulletin, where he stayed until 1907. He moved to New York to work at the New York Evening Mail, which had a wider outreach and his cartoons were seen by a broader audience. By 1915 he was billed as America’s most popular cartoonist. In 1916 he created a series of short films and produced several cartoon series including Mike and Ike (They Look Alike), Lala Palooza, and Foolish Questions. However, the strip that gave him the Rube Goldberg Machine was called The Inventions of Professor Lucifer Gorgonzola Butts A.K.
Fun Fact: Rube Goldberg is the only person listed as an adjective in the Merriam Webster Dictionary!
WHAT IS THE RUBE GOLDBERG CHALLENGE?
A Rube Goldberg machine is a machine that is intentionally designed to perform a simple task, in an indirect and overly complicated way. These tasks can range from making a cup of coffee, sharpening a pencil, screwing in a light bulb and everything in between. Usually, the machines consist of a series of simple devices in which the action of each trigger start the next, and eventually achieves the intended goal.
Whittle D.C.’s 10th Grade Class decided to start a Rube Goldberg machine challenge among their peers, to stay connected in this time of distance-learning. The challenge was embraced by students across all divisions. Even some teachers decided to participate, transforming this small activity to an unintentional way to unite the Whittle community!
TRY THE CHALLENGE AT HOME!
A popular activity for students and adults of all ages, the challenge centers around students creating an obstacle course or simple “chain-reaction” machine from everyday objects they will have in their home. Families will not need to purchase any items for the challenge. In fact, they are discouraged from doing so. Students will film the full machine in action and share the video online. There will be an opportunity for students to design towards certain challenges, and with each addition the list of challenges grows. This is NOT a competition; instead, this project will be an opportunity for students to challenge themselves and be creative while at home. The challenge is to build your own Rube Goldberg machine at home and share it with the Whittle community! We hope you will bring your natural curiosity and creativity to this process. To help inspire you, we’ve laid out some challenges that you might want to try to achieve, but please don’t let this list limit your project!
Challenges:
Include more than 10 separate “objects” • Include more than 10 separate “actions” • Lift an object higher than one meter • Serve a purpose (e.g., feeding a pet, washing dishes, completing some kind of task) • Coordinate with someone else’s project remotely • Incorporate music, video, other multimedia elements • Occupies more than two rooms/spaces in your home • Include indoor and outdoor elements • Make creative use of household objects • Involve water • Include pets • Include family members • Is more than one minute long • Transport a ball or marble • Incorporate food • Touch the ceiling • Travel from one floor of a building to another • Have a Whittle theme • Incorporate stuffed animals • Use materials found in nature (e.g., sticks, rocks, pinecones) • Have a soundtrack • Include a blooper reel • Think outside the box
Project Logistics and Guidelines:
Use only things that are already in or around your home – don’t go out and buy or order new things just for this project
Each machine needs to use 5 or more objects
The machine should be the work of the students and not their parents
Households with more than one Whittle student can do one project or those students can each submit their own
All students must build a machine and submit a video
Be creative!
Be open to failure
Test components or actions individually before putting them together
Plan things out before you begin – try making a drawing or a map!
Submit your video:
Click here to submit your video!