Rube Goldberg Variations: Applied Physics (Design and Build Week)

The second half of our extended deep dive in May 2022 was the direct application of the concepts of mathematics and physics that we’d learned in the first half of the class. Students made Rube-Goldberg machines that incorporated all six of the simple machines of physics in order to accomplish a task in a fun and unusual way.

As always, the makings were accompanied by an essay that clearly explained how their creative work was informed by the concepts that we learned in class. In this deep-dive, that written work took the form of an ad for their invention. 

Our year's end was an echo of our year's beginning: at the start of the year, when we lived within a camera obscura for a week, we learned to see what was right before our eyes with renewed clarity, a clarity that was wedded to wonder. We then put those rigorously imaginative minds to work to design and 3D-print objects of our invention in our "Star-Splitter Spark Tank."

During our final week of school, we reprised the Star-Splitter Spark Tank and shared with one another the machines of our invention. The inventions exercised similar tools of thinking that were utilized during that first deep-dive: the students were thinking, designing, and creating with precision and imagination.