Rube Goldberg

[joannqn]

So, DS9 tells me he wants to build a Rube Goldberg machine. :willy_nilly:

 

They look so cool, but I feel so overwhelmed just thinking about it. I mean, there are so many parts to figure out how to put together. Then there's the cost of those parts.

 

Since we'll be doing physics (RS4K) from now to the end of the school year, I told him we can do one as a culminating project. In the meantime, he can think of how he wants to incorporate the physics we are learning into his machine.

 

Any advise? Is there a how to manual for these things? I'm so not into building things and admire some of the cool things I've seen other homeschool kids do.

[Ohdanigirl]

No advice here, sorry. see what ou mean about the prices though. Does he have an idea of what exactly he would like to do? You may be able to find some books. While doing a search many things came up, book suggestions, a contest, and I believe a Science PDF book too. Maybe you can start there.

 

Looks like great fun. Let us know how it goes.

 

Danielle

[KAR120C]

...should be built out of available parts that he figures out himself.

 

They look so cool, but I feel so overwhelmed just thinking about it. I mean, there are so many parts to figure out how to put together. Then there's the cost of those parts.

 

Don't buy anything, and don't do the figuring out part! Certainly help (especially when there are tools involved), but don't panic. And remember... most of the original Rube Goldberg machines were drawn, not built. He was a cartoonist. If there's any buying to do, I'd get the book. (Unfortunately it's out of print and a little pricy, but much less than buying lots of parts!)

 

The engineering school here requires a freshman project at the end of the first term, and one of the options is a Rube Goldberg machine. The rules determine a footprint and a budget, and within that you get a lot of dixie cups, dominos, K'nex, marbles, matchbox cars, and empty poptart boxes to hold it all together. They're lots of fun, but also (if you're serious about engineering) they're a great time to discuss reliability, process issues, testing, and all of the less-glamorous aspects of the job.

[Jenny in Florida]

I agree with Erica. There should be no or only very minimal buying involved in this kind of project. I'm pretty sure my son would recommend cardboard and duct tape.

 

And, personally, I think anyone thinking of building a Rube Goldberg machine should watch this video:

 

Also probably this one that talks about how they did it:

 

This should be fun and creative, not something for which you buy a kit or follow directions.

[Spetzi]

My Odyssey of the Mind team is building one. It's been a great experience for them.

 

I had them watch the machines on youtube. There are many good ones and a bunch of crummy ones. I gave them lots of junk and they went to town. They have built and re-built it. The've used cereal boxes, cardboard, cd cases, parts from games, marbles, lots of tape, mousetraps, etc. The videos will give lots of ideas to experiment with.

 

It's not that hard and it looked like a lot of fun. I'm not allowed to help or join in due to the Odyssey of the Mind contest rules, but I wanted to play.:laugh:

 

Don't be intimidated.

[Dmmetler]

If you can find the old "The Incredible Machine" computer games, they're building Rube Goldberg machines on screen for a specific task, and are very cute. However, I think they're all DOS or Win 3.1 games, so I don't know that they'd run on any modern computer.

[Jenny in Florida]

If you can find the old "The Incredible Machine" computer games, they're building Rube Goldberg machines on screen for a specific task, and are very cute. However, I think they're all DOS or Win 3.1 games, so I don't know that they'd run on any modern computer.

 

There's something similar called Crazy Machines. It's available on iTunes. My son and husband both have it on their iPods and love it.

[Nan in Mass]

Ok - that was very cool! Thank you, Jenny!

 

My sons prefer masking tape to duct tape. They find it easier and stickier. For years, we gave them rolls of masking tape for birthdays and Christmas, before every long car ride, weekend visit, sailing vacation, or any other event where we needed them to behave. Masking tape, cardboard, string, and sticks will build just about anything.

 

If your son is anything like my children, you better lay down some ground rules to start with. They may not touch your vacuum cleaner or its hose, your sewing machine, any of your kitchen equipment, the pets, or the baby. They may not use your yard stick as a spring. They may not put any sort of tape on the antique furniture. Any tape on anything else has to have the end folded over so it can be peeled off easily. They are not allowed to set anything on fire or explode anything. Other rules can be made as you go as long as you watch carefully and anticipate problems.

 

As far as where to start, you can think in terms of converting potential energy to motion and vice versa. You have to start with potential energy - a weight at a height or a spring or something. Then think how that will be converted to motion when released. Then think how that motion can be converted to potential energy again. So for example, a heavy ball can be set rolling down some half papertowel tubes from a height. It can fall into a cup which is attatched to a string wound around a toilet paper tube with a stick through it. As the cup sinks, the tube spins. The other end of the string is attatched to a paper cup full of dried beans. This cup rises as the cup with the ball lowers. At some point, the lip of the cup hits a bar that causes it to tip up and dump out the beans. These fall into a cup attatched to one end of a seesaw. When the other end of the seesaw rises, a ball is released at a height which rolls down doing something else. And so forth. I have no idea whether this would work (I think it is running out of energy too quickly to be much fun) but that is the general idea. Things can happen along the way, like pinwheels set spinning and dominoes set tumbling and other extraneous but pretty events.

 

You need to decide on the scale of things, too. If it is going to be inside on the kitchen table, your machine is going to look very different from something set up in the woods.

 

You will need space and some sort of scaffolding in order to set it up. My children generally use chairs as scaffolding, to hold things. They use the tops of doors if they need something really high. If you do it outside, then you can use trees and sticks stuck in the ground and tilted picnic benches and lawn chairs and the whole thing is much easier. If it is small, then stacked books and dishes work pretty well.

 

Tin foil and cut up plastic containers and bent paper clips and coat hangers also are handy.

 

Hopefully this gives you some ideas to start with. What fun!

 

-Nan

[catz]

I agree with Erica. There should be no or only very minimal buying involved in this kind of project. I'm pretty sure my son would recommend cardboard and duct tape.

 

:iagree: My son has been obsessed with Rube Goldberg machines for years. He has set up small things a number of times. I tend to be very hands off about this kind of thing - he's used stuff around the house, I'll let him take a corner of the house for a few days. My biggest recommendation is to start small and if he wants to do more, let him add on from there. I know with my own kid what he envisions in his head and might draw and plan might not match what his motor skills and patience are capable of. Let him take the lead and don't have any expectations about how it should progress.

[Jenny in Florida]

My sons prefer masking tape to duct tape. They find it easier and stickier. For years, we gave them rolls of masking tape for birthdays and Christmas, before every long car ride, weekend visit, sailing vacation, or any other event where we needed them to behave. Masking tape, cardboard, string, and sticks will build just about anything.

 

If your son is anything like my children, you better lay down some ground rules to start with. They may not touch your vacuum cleaner or its hose, your sewing machine, any of your kitchen equipment, the pets, or the baby. They may not use your yard stick as a spring. They may not put any sort of tape on the antique furniture. Any tape on anything else has to have the end folded over so it can be peeled off easily. They are not allowed to set anything on fire or explode anything. Other rules can be made as you go as long as you watch carefully and anticipate problems.

 

I love this second paragraph. You might have enjoyed my little rant this afternoon when I returned from a trip to Target to buy more pens. As I opened the package and gave my son the one green pen (his favorite color), I delivered a strong lecture with accompanying threats about what would happen to him if I once again began finding pens lying about that had been taken apart and were missing their springs.

 

He didn't even try to claim innocence.

 

I'm tempted to say that our children would enjoy each other's company, but I'm a little terrified of what they might do if we let enough of them get together!

[joannqn]

Nan, no concerns here. My kids are not very creative, handy, or destructive, which is partially why this is overwhelming. My guess is that he won't know where to start or what to do; he just thinks they are neat to watch.

 

They don't even know how to make stuff with empty cardboard boxes. The most I've seen them do, really, is use half a roll of scotch tape to attach pieces of paper to toilet paper tubes. Really, their building/creating skills are pathetic.

 

We're more of an academic/technology family than a hands on/creative family.

[Nan in Mass]

Well, at least you needn't fear for your timer, with its lovely long spring.

Maybe you could start with a pack of index cards, some marbles, some scotch tape, and a chair. You can roll the index cards into tubes, tape them shut, and then start taping the tubes together and to the chair to make a marble run. You can make branches by cutting the tubes at an angle and taping them together. If you put plenty of tilt on the tubes, the marble should run through even if the construction job isn't very good. When you get good at that, you can start leaving gaps and adding funnels to catch the marble and channel it back into the tubes. Running multiple marbles down the tubes adds interest. You can have races. The winner is the one whose marble takes the longest to come out without getting stuck. Something like that would be an easy way to learn some construction skills. If they aren't building by now on their own, you probably are going to have to do lots of helping and demonstrating. I have the opposite problem - two of mine don't stop building and now that they are older, their contraptions are scarier. I don't think the neighbors appreciated the potato cannon. : )

-Nan

[Nan in Mass]

Groan - those attractive little springs and those nice strudy little tubes. I don't use pens myself, so it doesn't bother me too much when they take them apart, except for finding the abandonned ink cartridges just waiting to be stepped on. What miffs me is the mechanical pencils. Grrrr.

 

Yup. I can just imagine the positive feedback loop of ideas spiralling into way too much fun LOL.

 

-nan

[joannqn]

You can foster creativity. Experimenting in the kitchen is great - helper of the day can make faces on the english muffin pizzas, different shapes with the veggies (curlicue carrots, rosebud radishes) etc. It's also fun to keep a 'found' box. In it you put all the things that are OK to use for projects...empy oatmeal containers, toilet paper tubes, random cardboard, twistie ties, stiff plastic sheets, cores from tape, bits of ribbons, foam trays etc. They make space ships, cars, paper dolls, whatever. Dollar store tape, a glue stick, and scissors will take themfar. Creating holiday cards is good too - make stamps, use scraps of yarn, whatever inspires the child. If you borrow Highlights mag from the library, they have good craft and game building suggestions for inspiration or look here:

http://www.highlightskids.com/Express/Crafts/h13craftsArchive_decorations.asp

Traditional kid's youth group programming and Odyssey of the Mind material also have resources. I think part of what I brought to my kids was a result of library summer reading programming, the other part from scouting/4H and growing up with the depression era "make it do" thinking. We'd never run into town for something storebought like our current neighbors do..we'd look around the house and see what we had, then make it do. Really fosters creativity.

 

We used to have a found box but I got rid of it because it was never used. The only thing I can remember them making was my daughter cutting a head out of paper and using half the roll of tape to attach it to a toilet paper tube, along with rectangle arms and legs.

 

They really are challenged in the building stuff area. Blocks and megablocks got/get stacked but never turned into anything. Lincoln logs were ignored. They stacked Legos but never built anything but short towers. I bought my son the Unofficial Lego Builder's Guide so he could learn how to use them to build things. He's made the house out of that.

 

I'll have to be showing them how to build. I never thought of about it and/or didn't know how to model this stuff. I didn't play with Legos so I really don't know what to do with them either. It didn't occur to me that they could help with things until a friend came over to help me dismantle my old schoolroom and I had to sit and nurse. She had both boys helping to take apart some shelving. I was dumbfounded that a 3 and 8 year old could do something like that.

 

Now, I'm learning that kids can do stuff like building things. We're so far behind the curve on certain things.

 

ps. Where do I buy marbles? I haven't seen them in years. I think they'd get a kick out of marble runs.

[Nan in Mass]

Hmmm... the toy stores here all have them, especially at this time of year. Do you have any small toy stores? Something smaller than a huge Toys R Us? Do you have any clay? You can make your own marbles by rolling a ball of clay. Craft stores sell sculpi clay, which is a plastic that you bake in the oven to harden, and air-dried clay clay (would make good marbles). There are recipes for salt clay (like playdough) that you make yourself with flour and water. You can make papermache balls, but they are rather light for your purposes, and probably a bit bumpy. You would want to put a rock in the middle. Those would be fun because they wouldn't have the center of gravity in the center.

 

A favourite game of our 1 and 2 year olds was hammering nails into a cardboard box or a large piece of styrofoam. Roofing nails were particulalry good because they had a big head. Of course, one had to watch the baby while they did it, so they didn't take the hammer to something else or eat the nails, but it kept them occupied for hours. When they were a bit bigger, stumps worked well. Have you seen the book that helps children learn house construction techniques by building a shed?

 

-Nan

[joannqn]

Nan, thanks for the marble run how to. I stopped by the Dollar Tree and found round decorative glass balls in their craft section, index cards, and tape. Then I came home and build a four index card long marble run with a turn in it using Tinker Toys a friend just handed down to us. They were so excited over the silly thing. Then I showed them how to go up with the run. They thought it was cool.

 

They've been given the challenge of creating a run that goes up at least twice, goes left at least once, goes right at least once, takes a jump (didn't show them how to make a jump), and lands in a cup. They are busy working on it.