Adam & Amber’s Blog

I am involved with a project at work where we go out to area schools with projects that are meant to show that engineering can be fun. This year I am on the team charged with developing a project to bring to Middle Schools. One idea we had was to attempt to do a Rube Goldberg Machine. For those of you not familiar with Rube Goldberg, he was a cartoonist who did most of his work in the early 1900’s. His most remembered cartoons involve very complicated machines that were built to do very simple tasks. A collection of his works can be seen at www.rube-goldberg.com.

I built this demo machine last night. The objective was to “park” a toy car, which I was able to do in five steps. The machine worked very well, however the toy cars Amber and I purchased at the dollar store last night, did not perform admirably.

On a side note, this is the first video I have posted to YouTube, when waiting for my video to pop-up on the “Recently Added” list (you know you would have done the same), I was amazed at the volume of video that gets posted (about 20-30 videos per minute by my count).

Speaking of Rube Goldberg, I also found one of my favorite Rube Goldberg Machines posted on YouTube (while I was using the “search” to find my video, again you know you would have done the same!). This machine was professionally made for a Honda commercial. It is all real, they only used parts from the car itself, and if I remember correctly they did it in one continuous shot.

P.S. A big thanks to Ernie for letting us borrow his video camera.