Rube Goldberg Machines ... Students in Amy Guillory’s Introduction to Engineering class recently designed and built Rube Goldberg machines to help them learn about the field of mechanical engineering. Rube Goldberg, an engineer and inventor, became famous for his cartoons of overly complicated machines doing very simple tasks. Rube Goldberg machines rely on a domino effect or chain reaction to get the job done.

Each student was asked to make a Rube Goldberg machine that poured cereal from a box into a bowl. "The machine was required to have eight steps and use at least three different simple machines, such as a lever, pulley, wheel and axle, inclined plane, or wedge," said Mrs. Guillory. “Once students started their machines, they were not allowed to touch them until the cereal came out of the box,” she noted.

On Wednesday, they had a chance to demonstrate their machines. After a little fine tuning by classmates and the teacher, most of them worked.

"I think the students were surprised by the complexity of the task," said Mrs. Guillory. "It isn't easy to make a multi-part machine work perfectly multiple times in a row."

( Photo: Senior Daniel Mayeaux with his Rube Goldberg machine. His creation required a remote control car to drag the cereal box off a chair and to make the contents pour out.)

Code Writers ... "This is the biggest coding project we've ever done," said Computer Science I student Jacob Folse. "It has 168 levels; 50 is normal for us." The complex project involved writing code in JavaScript to make a game.

"The game," explained Computer Science teacher Kathleen Judd, "required creating a grid of bricks at the top of the game canvas, then starting a ball bouncing. The player has to keep the ball from hitting the bottom of the canvas by bouncing off a paddle. When all the bricks are removed (by hitting them with the paddle), the user has won."

The project was a culmination of several week's work on programming and graphics during which students learned about variables, booleans, logical and comparison operators, if statements, for and while loops, and functions. "Students also learned about using timers, random numbers, mouse events, key events, and creating and moving shapes," said Mrs. Judd.

This morning, the programmers had a chance to see how well they did when elementary students in Sherry Allen's class stopped by their classroom in Novak Hall to play their games. Both players and programmers had fun. When a player wanted a game to move faster, it was an advantage to have the programer close at hand to not only make the adjustment in the code but to explain exactly how it's done.

( Photo: Chloe Hall, 6C, plays a computer game as programmers Joel Pena, grade 9, and Jacob Folse, grade 10 stand by.)