State High junior Wyatt Kline needed to erase a whiteboard on Wednesday, so he flipped a switch, stepped back, and held his breath.
The switch turned on a battery on a machine handcrafted out of metal and wood. The battery activated a small motor that pushed a lever forward, sending a heavy weight sliding down a ramp.
When the weight reached the end of the ramp, it fell off and pulled a string that was tied to the trigger of a Nerf gun. The toy dart gun fired, sending a dart rocketing into a small hammer sitting on the top of the machine.
The dart knocked the hammer over, sending it careening into a series of metal balls suspended from the top of the machine. The balls knocked another weight off the edge of the machine, activating a system of pulleys.
The pulleys moved a series of gears that were attached to a metal arm. The metal arm ended in a whiteboard eraser, which shook back and forth as the pulleys spun, erasing the whiteboard. The entire process took about three seconds, but about three months to design and build.
“I was so pumped when I saw that it worked for the first time,” Kline says. “I love building things and watching everything come together.”
This absurd series of steps makes up a device known as a “Rube Goldberg machine.” It was built by Kline and two of his classmates for an engineering and technology course. Rube Goldberg machines – named for a popular cartoonist and inventor from the early 1900s – are contraptions that use a purposefully complicated series of steps to perform a simple task.
State High engineering and technology teacher Doug Ripka says his students were tasked with building their own whiteboard-erasing machines as a way to gain hands-on experience with construction and design. The teams even had to present their designs to professional engineers for feedback, which they incorporated into the final product.
Charlie Simpson-Hall, who worked alongside Kline, says building their machine was easily the most difficult project he’d ever done in school – even with his years of design experience from the high school’s engineering classes.
Simpson-Hall says the team began brainstorming ideas back in December, imaging different simple machines and different ways to put them together. Once they came up with a system they thought would work, they had to build their elaborate contraption by hand over the coming months.
“It takes a lot of creativity to build something like this. You really have to think outside the box,” says senior Ali Treglia, who helped build a machine that used metal balls, carefully placed dominoes and an eraser that was propelled across a whiteboard by a rubber band slingshot.
Each machine worked differently, with varying numbers of steps. One used scissors to cut a string the held up an eraser that rested against a whiteboard, while another used a motor to spin two erasers around.
“Nobody is building their machine in the same way as someone else,” Ripka says. “I want them to see that there’s no right answer to this problem. There’s only their answer.”
One of the most out-of-the-box designs was dreamed up by senior Evan Shriver and his team.
A plastic tub filled with water sat on a table, while an empty tub sat underneath it on the floor. When activated, the machine pulled a cap out of a tube coming out of the full tub, sending a spout of water cascading onto a water wheel in the empty tub.
The water wheel was attached by string to an eraser, pulling it across the whiteboard as the wheel spun. Though Shriver’s team was still tweaking some minor aspects of the design on Wednesday, they’d accomplished something that no other team had.
“Mr. Ripka has banned the use of water in these projects now because of us,” Shriver says, explaining that the water didn’t always go where it was supposed to. “We’re pretty proud of that.”
