Rube Goldberg Projects

According to the English WikiPedia: "A Rube Goldberg machine is a contraption, invention, device or apparatus that is deliberately over-engineered or overdone to perform a very simple task in a very complicated fashion, usually including a chain reaction."

Here are items on our "Rube Goldberg wish list." If you have these items laying around in your garage AND your parents don't want them / say it's OK to donate them to school, we'd love to have them:

    1. clear plastic tubes (with large enough diameter for a marble to roll down it)

    2. wooden train track

    3. Hot Wheels / Matchbox car plastic track

    4. 1 inline skate

    5. Pool balls (for billiards - not for a swimming pool)

    6. small steel balls (marble size)

    7. Funnels (large enough for a marble or small steel ball to roll through if possible)

    8. Wooden sawhorses

    9. Bowling Ball

    10. Small pails

    11. Tennis balls

    12. Metal guttering (CLEAN - something we can use as a 'track' for a rolling ball)

These are clever video examples of Rube Goldberg Projects.

Check out more examples of Rube Goldberg Projects in this YouTube playlist. This July 2013 article from Mashable also includes some amazing Rube Goldberg project videos.

These are some of the Rube Goldberg Project experiments our students have created! These are available (with more coming soon) in a YouTube playlist.