Jr. High Engineering Challenges

By Ian Holbrook

      What does Rube Goldberg and Project Learn school junior high have in common? They both designed machines.

    This year, in the beginning 2014 Project Learn School spring electives, eleven kids and two teachers walked up Germantown Avenue to create art with senior citizens at the Germantown Home. While they were doing that, the rest of the Junior High, nine of them, stayed at the school and made Rube Goldberg machines and potato cannons, in what was called the “Engineering Alternative.” Most of the kids enjoyed this. Most of the kids made a section of the Rube Goldberg machine and one just helped other people. This alternative was a good combination of fun and learning.

 The kids also made a potato cannon. A potato cannon is a cannon made out of PVC pipe with an igniter taken from a gas barbeque grill, to set it off. The name is self-explanatory but a potato cannon is basically a cannon that shoots out a potato at a very fast speed. These cannons are pretty dangerous, but sometimes things need to be dangerous to be educational. The pieces of the cannon were secured with PVC glue.

    The Rube Goldberg machine students built moved a marble from one place to another. The machine included a weight going down a string like a zip line. That weight then hit a golf ball pushing into a tube; the golf ball came out of the tube and hit a domino that set off a domino chain. That went up stairs made out of blocks. The last domino hit a marble that went through a marble track and fell out at the bottom.

    Rube Goldberg was an artist who made comic drawings of machines that helped people do everyday things in unnecessarily complicated ways. Goldberg did not make the machines, only drew them. Then people were inspired to make the machines. He was born in 1883. Rube Goldberg’s comics were syndicated in the early 1900s. He won the Pulitzer Prize for cartooning in 1948. Rube Goldberg died in 1970.

    The machine did not work the first time because they are complicated and take a lot of patience. The participants learned how to make an effective machine while having fun, too.