Complex Machines, Simple Goal

by Donna Jones Pelkie

What can you make with an old faucet, a broken lamp, ball bearings, bike parts, plastic bottles, string, PVC pipes and a lot of duct tape? Something that can empty dead batteries from a flashlight, replace them with new ones and turn on the flashlight. Or, more simply, a Rube Goldberg Machine. But simple is not what these machines are all about.

For the past 10 years, Argonne has challenged students to build complex contraptions in its annual Rube Goldberg Machine Contest for high schools. Year after year, students from Chicago area high schools have proven they're more than up to the challenge of building a machine that must take at least 20 steps to complete a simple task. The contest introduces students to engineering concepts in an entertaining way.

In the 2005 contest, for the third year in a row, students from Morgan Park Academy in Chicago took first place. The win was the culmination of many hours of hard work that began Thanksgiving weekend and didn't end until 11 p.m. on the eve of the Feb. 18 event. No less dedicated was the students' advisor, physics teacher Larry Brown, who let the students build the machine in the basement of his Chicago bungalow. Brown is quick to point out that it's also the good grace of his wife, Nancy, that helps make the project successful. “Can you imagine turning your house over to half a dozen teenage boys,” Brown says with a twinkle in his eyes. “When these guys leave, it's awful quiet,” Nancy said. “But I kind of miss them when they're gone. They probably don't believe me, but it's true.”

Most of the students on the team are repeat participants who started entering the contest as freshmen and are now seniors. “That first year,” said Brown, “it was like herding spiders.” Over the years, besides learning how to build a better Rube Goldberg machine, “we've certainly seen some kids mature and some of them find direction for their future,” he said.

And encouraging students to make science a part of their academic and professional future is one of the main goals of the competition. “It's effective at doing this because it's both challenging and fun,” said Argonne's David Baurac.

Baurac and Harold Myron, director of Argonne's Division of Educational Programs, founded the Argonne contest in 1996 as part of the laboratory's 50th anniversary celebration. The contest was such a hit, they decided to make it an annual event. It was the first high school contest sanctioned by Rube Goldberg, Inc., the official keepers of all things Rube.

“ We know the contest influences participants, because a number of students on our teams have gone on to run the annual high school contest at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. That contest is a spin-off from Argonne's contest. It was started by two students who had been on the Marist High School team that won our second contest in 1997. Two years later, as engineering students, they started the university's competition as their contribution to the School of Engineering's annual celebration of Engineering Week.

“ Designing and building a Rube Goldberg machine has a lot in common with modern research and development,” says Baurac. “Specifically, it's creative problem solving, and it's a team activity. The teachers I talk to tell me that the contest is not about winning, it's about the experience of participating.”

Brown agrees. While building a machine, his students have to cooperate and communicate. They learn how to see a project to completion. They become responsible to each other. “These are things I can't teach in the classroom,” Brown said. “This thing is about as close as they're going to get to the real world, outside of working at a place like Argonne.”

Brown's students agree that participating in the Rube contest helps them see science and engineering in a different light. “I think it's very influential,” said junior Chris Brewin, “because it's something you're not just doing on paper. You're actually doing it in real life, and you get to work with other people, and it's not just theoretically how you can do stuff.”

While the Morgan Park team is an all-volunteer group, students from suburban Riverside-Brookfield High School participate in the contest as part of their class curriculum. Teacher Zak Knott requires his honors physics students to build Rube Goldberg machines as a class assignment. Knott holds an in-school run-off competition, and the winning machine enters the Argonne contest.

Knott believes building these machines is a good way to demonstrate what might otherwise be abstract physics concepts. “Much of physics revolves around creating a design to solve a problem,” Knott said. “This really fits that perfectly.”

The day of the school run-off, it became obvious that for some students what started out as a just another homework assignment had become something they really wanted to work well.

“ At first we hated it,” one student confided. “but once we had a plan and were making things work, it became more exciting.”

Knott's students work on their machines for nearly three and a half months. They're required to check in with their teacher periodically with outlines and reports on their progress. The day of the run-off proved that despite having the same assignment, no two Rube Goldberg machines are ever alike. Some machines were very utilitarian; others took the artistic and thematic part of the project just as seriously as the scientific. One machine had a Batman theme, and team members sported matching black T-shirts with bat symbols. Another featured SpongeBob Squarepants with team members wearing SpongeBob party hats. And one student from “Team Garbage” had a shirt that said it all: “One man's garbage is another kid's physics project.”