Wyoming — The marble rolled through a toilet paper tube and down a race car track that was positioned on top of a stack of textbooks. It hit a domino. The domino toppled and hit a matchbox car, propelling it forward. The car hit another domino, which then fell into a bell.
“Ding!”
The task in seventh-grade science teacher Kristi Vugteveen’s class was complete. Students created five-step Rube Goldberg machines, intricate contraptions that create a chain reaction to accomplish a simple task. The idea is from American cartoonist Rube Goldberg, whose cartoons often depicted devices that performed simple tasks in indirect, convoluted ways.
’I see students engaged who aren’t normally engaged, and students working together who wouldn’t normally work together.’
— science teacher Kristi Vugteveen
The goal for Wyoming Junior High seventh-graders, however, was to learn about the transfer of energy — its movement from one place to another.
Students designed and tested their machines, discussing how to make a marble, ping-pong ball or toy car travel fast and straight enough to hit a tiny bell hanging from a thread.
“We’ve learned weird ways you can accomplish simple things like ringing a bell,” said seventh-grader Connor Hughes.
He described the conundrum his group was facing before reconfiguring the items in their machine to create a more direct route for their marble. Their original design was for their marble to hit a car halfway down the track.
“We lose kinetic energy when we use the car in the middle of the domino track,” Connor explained. “Whenever we add the car in, the chime sounds dimmer and not as loud.”
Vugteveen’s class was engaged in a unit on energy in the Mi-STAR science curriculum. Watching marble-hit-car-hit-domino reactions powered the lesson, she said.
“They can actually see (where) the energy transfers. I see students engaged who aren’t normally engaged, and students working together who wouldn’t normally work together.”
As seventh-grader Jameson Engvall explained, “When one thing hits another thing, that’s the transfer.”
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