For the past three weeks, Starkville High School junior James Fairley’s ping pong table at home was covered with marble tracks, books, boxes and a remote-control airplane.
Fairley and three of his classmates created a “complicated” machine to push a cup of coins into a pot of gold. SHS physics teacher Dane Peagler challenged his classes to construct a Rube Goldberg machine, which completes a simple task through a series of steps.
“We had a room and we were out of the way,” Fairley said. “It was a big mess doing all this. So the sun room was pretty messed up for three weeks.”
It all paid off Thursday when Fairley and his team of three other classmates won Best of Show in the Rube Goldberg Physics Competition at SHS.
With about 40 students separated into 12 competing groups, the school’s east wing hallway was crowded and stocked with machines working throughout the morning. Complicated machines were simultaneously popping balloons, dumping buckets, chopping celery, recycling and placing Mickey Mouse in a Christmas basket.
Rube Goldberg machines are named for the American cartoonist and sculptor who, in the 1940s, drew cartoons depicting a series of coordinated gadgets completing simple tasks.
A complicated machine
The winning team consisted of Fairley, and seniors Madeline Tegt, Gloria Zhang and Elizabeth Leigh. Their machine worked without a hitch.
It started by placing a marble on a marble track, winding downhill and gathering speed. When the track ended, the marble hit a deck of cards onto a see-saw, causing a weight to rise with a pulley mechanism. The pulley twisted a screw which hit another ball that rolled down an incline to a race car.
The race car rolled down a ramp hitting dominoes, knocking a ball down a paper towel tube and rolled onto a remote control, which turned the propellers on an airplane duct taped to a chair. Once the airplane produced enough wind, it pushed a boat made of a pool noodle on a tethered line and knocked a cup full of coins into a pot.
“We worked backwards, we started with the idea of dumping the gold,” Tegt said. “We made steps that would make the end goal happen. The hardest part was definitely the pulley and the screw.”
Tegt said each member worked on specific areas to create the machine. Since the students could only work outside the classroom, meeting with all members proved difficult.
“I learned not to procrastinate,” Fairley said. “I panicked a little bit as it got closer. It’s very unpredictable and learning how much force we need and it’s just been trial and error to perfect anything.”
Collectively what they learned was that everything may not come together and adjustments have to be made.
“The biggest thing I’ve learned is teamwork,” Tegt said. “I learned angles and how energy works. We had to have the perfect angles on everything. If we didn’t have enough momentum or energy, (the marble) wouldn’t knock the cards down, which was a problem for a while.”
Like most of the Rube Goldberg machines, the group pulled existing resources from everyone’s houses to create the mass project.
“This is my plane, so I have to set up the dominoes the right way,” Fairley said. “We needed some type of fan for wind power. I was thinking of all the fans that we could use, but I remembered I had a plane that could produce a lot of power.”
Peagler was particularly impressed with the group’s creativity and consistency.
“They were very articulate,” Peagler said. “It’s a good group. Whenever I found out that group was going to work together, I knew it was going to be something good. They’re very good kids, very reliable and dependable. … I’ve never had somebody do anything with that remote control like that with the plane.”
Building success
Peagler has held Rube Goldberg competitions since he came to SHS four years ago. This year, unlike most, each project was successful. Originally, the class project was designed to help recruit students to taking the physics class. In year one, Peagler said he had about 30 students. Now his classes total more than 80.
“Mr. Peagler’s class is really famous for these projects, so I was always interested in building one,” Tegt said. “It just seems really simple, but when you go to build it, it’s a lot more complicated than I imagined.”
Peagler said the students had a little more than a month to brainstorm and construct a project outside of class. Its purpose is to apply the knowledge and skills from his course to a “real-life” scenario in a hands-on way.
“It’s a good project,” Peagler said. “We’re trying to use the content to teach the skills the kids need going forward. We’re giving them a challenge that has constraints and forces them to work together to build this very specific machine. Some of my kids who struggle a little bit more in the class, they were able to contribute in ways they haven’t been able to in the classroom, (and) using all the ideas and engineering process to really flesh that out. It was a lot of work for all of them.”
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