Making a machine at Windsor School

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This article was published 15/04/2019 (2525 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Rube Goldberg would surely be amazed at the impact of his work in 2019.

The Pulitzer-prize winning cartoonist satirized American preoccupation with technology use in the ’40s and ’50s with drawings depicting interlinked complex gadgets that performed the simplest tasks in convoluted ways.

He inspired Hasbro’s “Mousetrap,” a unique three-dimensional board game with elaborate interconnected parts and cause-effect processes.

Grade 7 and 8 students from Windsor School in Louis Riel School Division were tasked with an enormous design challenge: build a functioning Rube Goldberg machine across an entire room.

Giovanni Lagadi, student services teacher, saw the event as an opportunity “to promote teamwork, communication, and critical thinking in a fun atmosphere.”

Students began by watching a YouTube video of a Rube Goldberg process and then selecting materials to build their machines and stimulate design conversations.

The room pulsated with figuring-out conversations and animated experimentation. Everywhere, learners whizzed duct tape from rolls; folded, bent, and cut cardboard into ramps and runways; shaped and cajoled Lego and Duplo shapes into walls; positioned straws into maze-like routes; organized wooden blocks into different heights and layers; twisted pipe cleaners to lengthen, buffer or connect parts; and so on.

Teams of two to three students created small machines at single tables, then stepped back to figure out how to connect all eight tables into a single contraption to accomplish the apparently simple task of popping a balloon.

Grade 7 student Rain Laurence was immersed in “building a ramp with straws as guides and a teeter-totter to propel the marble.”

“We’re trying to use confetti and duct tape to create an explosion at the last table when the balloon pops,” said Grade 7 student Hailey Lobb.

The event was run by an all-female team from the University of Manitoba’s Engineering Students Society (UMES) which works with elementary schools to increase the understanding of engineering at a young age.

Emma McTavish, third year mechanical engineering student, was a lead organizer of the event.

“Most girls don’t think about engineering at early ages. We want to change that,” she said.

Principal Ken Bartel believes, “It’s important for junior high students to work with university students to see career and educational paths.”

Did the marble make its way from start to finish and pop the balloon?

It needed a hand in a couple of places, but the massive contraption did what the students wanted for the most part, a tribute to design-thinking, experimentation, and ingenuity.
 
Adriano Magnifico is a community correspondent for St. Boniface. You can contact him at amagnif@mymts.net