Decatur Middle School students build Goldberg machines

Photo by Mike Eckels The LCD bulbs light up on a Rube Goldberg machine during a week-long study of this type of apparatus, which ended with demonstrations by students at Decatur Middle School Dec. 18. A large marble rolled down a paper tube (upper right) onto a wood tower with a series of five ramps. The marble rolled down each ramp until it hit a relay switch which triggered the lights.
Photo by Mike Eckels The LCD bulbs light up on a Rube Goldberg machine during a week-long study of this type of apparatus, which ended with demonstrations by students at Decatur Middle School Dec. 18. A large marble rolled down a paper tube (upper right) onto a wood tower with a series of five ramps. The marble rolled down each ramp until it hit a relay switch which triggered the lights.

DECATUR -- How do you build a simple toothpaste dispenser out of a radio-controlled car, two books, a bucket, a baseball and two butter cups? Put them in the hands of middle school students and tell them to engineer and build a machine that dispenses toothpaste onto a brush.

That is exactly what students at Decatur Middle School did on their last day of class before Christmas break, Dec. 18.

Students of Jessica Hartman, LaVonn Foreman and Kelly Hankins split into groups and were given one week to build a Rube Goldberg machine.

A Rube Goldberg machine is a contraption that performs a simple task in a complicated fashion. The device is deliberately over engineered, using a set of mismatched parts to create a chain reaction.

The machines are named after Rube Goldberg (1883-1970), who was an engineering graduate of the University of California at Berkeley, turned Pulitzer Prize winning cartoonist. His cartoons first appeared in the San Francisco Chronicles in the early 1900s. He later moved to New York City and went to work for Hearst publications. It is believed that Goldberg drew more than 50,000 cartoons in his lifetime.

One of Goldberg's cartoons called "Simple machine to keep employees happy on pay day" showed a pay clerk pulling down on a set of hands making them clap. This starts a chain reaction when a midget ham actor hears the applause and, thinking it is for him, takes a bow. His head hits an aspirating bottle that sprays nitrous oxide (laughing gas) onto the worker, causing a feeling of euphoria which keeps him from getting upset over his pay check deductions.

The Goldberg machines seen in regular newspaper cartoons and Sunday comics inspired a generation and created a worldwide phenomena. Today there are competitions across the United States to build the most elaborate Rube Goldberg machines. The Discovery Channel's "Mythbusters" program which aired Dec. 6, 2006, dedicated the entire episode to the construction and demonstration of a very over-engineered machine using diet cola, candy, trains, explosions and a turkey falling out of an oven to get its end result, knocking Buster (a crash-test dummy) out of his chair. The elaborate machine used 35 components and took three weeks to complete.

While the students at Decatur Middle School used fewer steps then the Mythbusters, their end results were some of the simplest designs that worked very well. One design utilized a marble, a series of cardboard tubes and five ramps to achieve the end result, turning on a series of LCD lights. The first two tries failed when the marble went off the second tunnel. But the third time was a charm as the marble made it through the tunnel, down the ramps and turned on the three red lights.

Other end results for the Goldberg machines included pouring a glass of water, popping a balloon full of confetti and throwing a cupcake at the students' teacher, Mrs. Hartman. But one of the most elaborate machines used 14 steps to reach its goal, to dispense toothpaste onto a toothbrush. The machine worked like this: a remote-controlled toy car drives up a ramp and jumps into a book which is standing on end. The book falls over, catching a spring attached to a catapult. On the end of the catapult is a butter cup with a tennis ball inside. The tennis ball is catapulted into a blue bucket which is tied to a string. The string goes through a pulley and the end is tied to an upside down butter cup. (Confused yet! Wait, there's more.) A baseball is suspended in the butter cup with only the string holding it in. The baseball is released, hitting the top of a ramp. The baseball rolls down and hits another book placed on its end. The book falls over, hitting an open tube of toothpaste. The paste is forced out of the open end and onto a toothbrush. Mission accomplished!

The machine worked very well during testing trials earlier in the morning. However, after several failed attempts, the teachers decided to give students one last chance to get the machine to work.

The car went up the ramp, knocking the book over and triggering the catapult which launched the tennis ball into the bucket, releasing the baseball, hitting the book. The book never fell over. It took one of the device's engineers to knock the book over, hitting the toothpaste and spurting out a blob of paste onto the toothbrush.

"It worked this morning," Hartman said. "I can't understand why it isn't working now."

It was heartwarming to watch the Decatur Middle School students utilize their cognitive skills to achieve their ultimate goal, to build a machine that works. The expression on their faces as they tried, first, to figure out what went wrong with their machine and, second, to find a solution and finally fix the glitch, was more entertaining than the machine. But seeing the students work together and come up with solutions to make their machine work was the end result of the Hartman, Foreman and Hankins Rube Goldberg machine.

General News on 12/30/2015