 Hello there. I'm Dr. Lee Zeitz, and I'd like to tell you about an opportunity I had last spring. I got to work with sixth graders as they explore the crazy world of Rube Goldberg. What? You've never heard of Rube Goldberg? Well, join me in a journey as we go off and discover how Rube Goldberg led our sixth graders to pursue their passions and STEM. It's an exciting journey. You know, Rube Goldberg was a cartoonist. During the first half of the 20th century, Goldberg drew a cartoon that he called The Inventions of Professor Lucifer Gorgonzola Butz. These pictures, these cartoons, depicted complicated inventions that were created to perform simple tasks, and this was the basis of the Rube Goldberg invention. You'll notice that on this page, there's the self-operating napkin, which is just exactly one of those inventions. Here's an example of a person who's ready to go to bed and wants to turn off the lights. This person pulls up the covers, and the covers are attached to a string that's attached to a bird that has a horn on the top of its head. That falls back. It pops a balloon. The balloon blows air that then takes the flame from the candle and puts it towards the cat. The cat doesn't like that. So the cat jumps forth, jumps into the water. The water splashes. It goes back up into the cup. The cup gets heavier. That causes the scissors to cut the string, and the string lets go and drops the lead weight, which then sets off the cannon and turns off the light. Pretty complicated, huh? How's that for easy? Let's take a look at an animation of this. Here's the Rube Works answer to how to turn off a light. The lights are turned off. Well, let's begin our journey. We begin in Waverly Shell Rock Middle School, right here in Iowa. There were some sixth grade teachers, and what they decided to do, they had four different classes. They decided that what they wanted to do was for the last three weeks of the year, they wanted to do some passion-based learning. They'd never tried this before, so they were going to give it a shot. And they wanted to align all the work that they did with the same standards and things that they had been doing all year long. So it wasn't just something fun to do, it was something that was very meaningful. They invited an inspirational speaker to come to campus and help the students identify their passions. And what we did is based upon the passions that the students identified, they teamed them up. And then they aligned all this, as I said, with standards. And the key was that what they would do was they would do projects based upon their passions, and then they would express themselves through blogging or research projects or movies or whatever it might be. So that was how it was going to be set. Now, I was all set, and I got to do something which was Rube Goldberg. I just brought up the idea, and they said, terrific, great idea. And imagine, if you will, that, believe it or not, there was a classroom that was completely empty. Next to the sixth grade rooms. They said I could use it, and it looked something like this on the first day, except for there wasn't anything in it. I mean, there were tables and things like that. But none of the stuff that you see there. Now, so we're sitting there, and I'm standing there, and 20 students came in, they went into three groups, they selected their own teams. I stood in front of the three teams of students and held up a marble. And I asked them to help me. And they said, you know, I have this marble, and I need to get it over into the bucket. How can I do that? And some students said, well, throw it. So I wrote, throw it on the board. And then I tried throwing it, and I missed. So I picked up the marble, and another student suggested bounce it. So I wrote bounce on the board. And I tried it, and I missed again. Now it was time to challenge the students. I gave a large marble to each of the teams, and challenged them to come up with ten ways in which they could get that marble into the bucket. And all of them took me up on the challenge. What they were supposed to, what they did is they wrote their great ideas on the boards, and they had a whole bunch of them. They ranged all the way from catapult to pipes to even radio-controlled helicopters. It was really quite inventive, if you think about it. After about five minutes, I realized that one of the teams just couldn't stand it anymore. And what they did is they began to rearrange their chairs in such a way so they could see if there was some way they could create a ramp that they could use to get the marble to travel down over into the bucket. These were our kinesthetic learners. Like I said, the students all selected on their own, so I didn't put them in any specific groups. The initial inventions that they had were really quite ingenious. As students looked around the room, they found that there were ramps and pipes and duct tape and a whole bunch of things for them to use. You might even notice that there were some innovative ways in which they used science books. Some students even used their iPads to come up with new ways in which they could do this type of project. This was the end of the first day. Now, when the students returned for the second day, I had already disassembled all of their inventions and placed all the materials on this table. You might notice that I actually added a whole lot of things. I brought in new tools for them to expand their experimentation. In stage two, we wanted to be more methodical about the way in which we did things. You see, we needed to consider the machines and ideas that they could use for their inventions. We wanted them to brainstorm a list of machines that they could then use and create an invention. It didn't matter if it was practical, it was a matter of brainstorming. You'll notice we have pipes and funnels and bounce it on a trampoline, get a trained dog, whatever it might be, whatever it takes to get it there. We didn't have any books available for Rube Goldberg inventions, so we turned to the internet. I used Google Docs where I created a document filled with links to videos and Rube inventions. The intent was for the students to watch these videos on their own and to get their ideas for their contraptions if they were inventing in class. We also watched some of these at the beginning of every session, just so they can get ideas about what to do and also maybe build the creative process. Here's an example of one of the videos that they had. There we go, right down. A little later, you'll understand why I selected how to turn a page. So here's the deal. I identified all of these ideas, all of these machines that they can put together, and then I asked them to design an invention. You can see the list of some of the ideas they had, and there's a diagram right next to them. This is basically what it is. If you take a look over here on the left-hand side, you'll see that there's a water faucet and it goes into a funnel. It goes up through this tube and then there's this balloon up here and then this ball starts going down. And then it has kind of a seesaw there. And then there's kind of a tether ball piece down here and then it goes down some dominoes, et cetera, and it goes into the bucket. Let's see what they came up with. It was similar to that. We have this part here where it goes down into the bucket. I can show you this part right here. These students are coming up with a way in which they can get a ball down here into this bucket. And it's going to go through here and then it's going to go over there and then we have some dominoes and there's going to be balls that are going to knock down those. So that looks pretty good. But let's see how it really works. So what does it have all about? This. This. Notice the water going down the faucet. You put the water here to go up. You don't want this balloon over here. It's going to fall down. It's going to move forward just a little bit. Are you going to knock over Winnie the Pooh? Winnie the Pooh is our master. And so then it'll knock down the dominoes. We'll have a ping-pong ball here. We'll have a ping-pong ball roll and go in here. Here's another one. And you'll notice that there's one point where they basically take a ball and just kind of throw it in the general direction of a car hoping that that's going to make things work. And yes indeed it does. So let's start it up and see what happens. It goes down. There's the ball. It hits the car. It knocks the lead ball and look at that right into the bucket. So their inventions were working. Now it's time to take it up at a notch. It's time to go for the final invention. And here we go. As I said before the goal in Goldberg invention is to accomplish a simple task. You know if we take a look at Webster's New World Dictionary it defines Rube Goldberg as a complicated invention laboriously contrived to perform a simple operation. Now I must admit that when we used it we used something a little simpler like a complex chain reaction created to achieve a simple task. Either way the idea is that it's very complicated and it's really just a very simple task. So what I wanted students to do is I wanted them to do some brainstorming about simple tasks. What they decided upon was they decided upon making a smoothie another one to put chips into salsa and another one popping a balloon. Let's go through and take a look. These are the steps that I wanted them to use. Please take a look at the words on the right hand side we'll be getting into those later but on the left hand side this was the process I wanted them to do. First of all I wanted them to identify a simple task. After they did that they needed to identify the parts of that simple task. Consider how the parts worked together and then for the rest of the invention they needed to use 15 ideas or machines, you know those little pieces like dominoes going down and then they needed to use at least three forms of energy. Those were what we saw on the previous page where they had the different types of energy. They needed to set up the plan and then build it. Let's start creating the final projects. Let's see what happens. In the first one the team was going to pop a balloon. Here are some photos of their contraption. You'll notice that there is a phone in the first photo and if you set your phone to vibrate and put it on an incline what will happen is that when you call it it will move down the slope it will vibrate down the slope and eventually hit the marble. This loop to loop that you see down at the bottom has a card and accelerator in it which gives it the power that it needs to knock over the Jenga blocks at the end. So are you ready to see this happen? Let's take a look. One, two, three! Now what's happening right now is they're phoning that phone and it's actually vibrating and it's moving down in a second and it's going to be hitting the ball. There it goes. Here comes the ball. Here comes the car. Shake the table! I guess sometimes you do shake the table. Now what about the smoothie? Now the smoothie I thought was one of the most industrious of them all because what they needed to do is they needed to take all of the the ingredients, get them into a blender and then somehow turn the blender on so they could actually have a smoothie and so you'll notice it on the left hand side in that cup there is a yogurt and a banana and then what they needed to do is on the other side is they actually started it with a ball at the very top you see up there with the pink up here and then the ball came down here ran down here went down the ramp and hit a power bar which turned it on and then started the smoothie and made your smoothie. Let's see what that looks like. Here we go. There it goes, the smoothie and we go up here to the top they add the ball the ball goes down comes down, turns it on and voila! A smoothie! That's terrific, eh? Now, dipping a chip, I must admit that this also was quite elaborate and if you take a look at it this is what it looks like and the ball will go down into this this tunnel, it'll go down this ramp go over here, continue down here it'll come back and then eventually it will roll down here, it'll come over here come down the pipe come back down here, come down here and then it will come down here and there is a robot that's going to be going along here with the chip, bring it over here and the funny thing was that they couldn't figure out how to make the robot arm put the chip into the dip so they're actually using a fulcrum so that when the ball comes down hits the lever this will come up and put the dip around the chip Let's see how that works goes down the tube comes back down the aisle notice they don't even have a ramp here goes down here down the ramp and here it comes it grabs it, it moves it over lifts it up and boom look at that it did indeed work so let's take a look at teaching strategies teaching strategies all about problem based learning you need to set up a problem based learning mindset and what this means is that you begin with an essential question like how do I get the ball in the bucket or later on you challenge them to generate a task that they're going to identify the task and then find the answer to then you provide a process structure you lead them along the discovery path but you don't control their progress you don't have to have step, step, step but you provide enough structure so they can learn from that and then you identify your deliverables and the other thing is that you want to identify parameters for the outcomes but you don't necessarily want to you don't want to squelch creativity so we tried to integrate physics into this I must admit that I'm not a physics teacher so I don't know a lot about that I had to do some reading and I had to contact some of my friends but here we presented the language we wanted to use the language you notice that when we talk about energy we're talking about transport and energy aspect when we get into kinetic and potential and thermal these are all the things that we use these terms as we did our projects and we wanted to build on the concepts and the process of what was happening and we aligned with standards we aligned with science, technology and writing and you'll notice that the students are working here on their project and right up above them are some sentence strips and on those sentence strips we have writing standards using technology to produce writing and interact and collaborate with others it sounds a lot like the blogging work that we were doing and so we have science and technology and you'll notice under science we talk about Newton's second and third laws and we didn't directly address that here but we're planning to do that this year when we continue with this under technology it says demonstrate creative thinking in design and development of innovative technology projects and problem solving the writing standards and the way we did this was we had students use kid blog to do blogging there's a wonderful blogging tool for students as each student blogged on their own blog what they posted actually appeared in this central blog you see right here on the screen that makes a tighter community and we expect them to respond to one another which they did and they actually responded to the responses kid blog also provides the teacher with the capability to control access as well as approve postings and comments before making them public we didn't monitor the postings or comments but we did limit the access so it was only the teachers and the students who had access to this now here's one that I just hit me between the eyes says inventing is like writing a book you get to have fun imagining new things and when you're done you feel like you accomplished something that's why I think inventing is cool beans and it really is cool beans especially when students show ownership now the key to success is student ownership when students work out of class on their own that means that they're excited about learning some of our students created complex inventions in Minecraft others created their inventions from things around the house most of them recorded them and then shared them at school here's a video of a Minecraft invention that is meant to drop a block into a hole now as we get this started you'll notice that right now there's the hole we're going back we're seeing all the blocks that he's loaded up and then we turn around and he hits the lever boom and now each of the blocks hits each other is a complex chain reaction and boom it dropped it right into the center remember when I showed you the idea for turning a page well here's one developed by one of our sixth grade troopers that ran with the help of his friend the bearded lizard there it goes on down hit that and boom turn the page we began this journey looking at ways to turn lights off in a room here's how some of our students address the challenge and that ladies and gentlemen is how Rube Goldberg led our sixth graders to pursue their passions instead hopefully this is just the beginning of a conversation about learning let's keep talking I'm available for workshops for lectures, for consulting some way in which we can work together please contact me through any of these media you can send me an email you can connect with me on twitter you can look at drzreflex.com or maybe even use a phone call just remember keep inventing the world is a wonder