Rube Goldberg Engineering Challenge!

This spring two students from Walsh joined others from Fuller and Cameron and participated in an interesting Engineering Challenge. 8th grader Henry Chickering and 7th grader Matt Beaudet were selected to be the Walsh students to work on this great project.
They joined Chris Stournaras, Lucxas Quesnel and Eric Jacobson from Fuller, and Anna Kennedy and Ryan Davenport from Cameron.

The students met for several practice sessions at Fuller Middle School with the Tech Ed teacher and Rube Goldberg Team Advisor, Mr. Phil Reitz. For the past several years the three Framingham Middle Schools have joined and put their creative efforts together and faced up to the Rube Goldberg Machine Design Contest at the Fay School in Southborough. This competition is held in conjunction with MIT in Cambridge and has grown from 16 schools to almost 25 schools from the New England area all meeting together on a Saturday in the spring at the Fay School.

Each year students are posed with a new challenge that plays off of the works of the artist/engineer, Rube Goldberg. If you know his work, you'll realize that it is just a little bit quirky! Drawing and publishing most of his cartoons in the 1930's - 1960's, Goldberg loved to poke some fun at how overly technological our society was becoming. He drew machines and devices that had multiple steps, far more than were really necessary to complete an otherwise simple task.

A few of the challenges in the recent years have included - "Pouring 8 ounces of water onto a plant." "Turning the pages of a book." And, this year's challenge which Henry and Matt worked on was to - "Staple three pages of paper together." 

All these may sound simple enough, but the main criteria that makes it a "Rube Goldberg" device is that it often will have 20 steps or more to complete the task! Picture swinging pendulums, marbles rolling, a Slinky that turns into a curling and curving slide, weights dropping, balloons popping, lots of duct tape...and, much, much more! All to get 3 pieces of paper stapled together! On the day of the competition each competing school team is given the exact same materials and challenge -- to build a device of their own creation that includes multiple steps and completes the exact same task....though each school team seems to go about this in very different ways! Throughout the afternoon, judges are roaming around asking teams questions about their contraptions and even taking notes as to the work and creativity involved. By the end of the day winners in different categories are announced to a gymnasium full of teams and families!

This year's crew from Framingham didn't win the competition, but they certainly came up with a very creative looking contraption that did the job in an admirable amount of steps and had a fun time doing it! But, winning isn't really what this kind of competition is about. It really is a chance for our students to do some critical and creative thinking; working together as a team to build a fun and challenging device; and just a chance to enjoy using our minds to expand beyond our everyday thinking and patterns. Thinking outside of the box!

How about you? Are you ready to think outside of the box?! Just check in with the Framingham Team and ask them how challenging, creative and fun a time it was to work on one of these crazy and quirky devices!!