Unlike the light bulb or the computer, inventions on display in one Cullen College of Engineering classroom last week will never be mass-produced for the American home.
A rough construction from household items, childhood toys and even Hurricane Ike remnants, students crafted curious contraptions to fill bowls with milk and cereal, decorate Christmas cookies, deliver a television remote by plane, pour a can of soda into a glass and turn a switch on and off.
All were inspired by Rube Goldberg, a famous cartoonist whose comics for years depicted strange contraptions loaded with whimsical touches that demonstrated a complex way to perform a simple task. Similar to Goldberg, the projects challenged the students to create a machine to perform a simple task using at least five unique steps. Students spent a month creating these one-of-a-kind machines, proving their knack for problem solving to both themselves and their instructor, Kathy Zerda.
In its third year, Rube Goldberg Project presentations were the final assignment for students in Zerda’s two fall ENGI 1100 courses.
Populated entirely with freshman and transfer Program for Mastery in Engineering Studies (PROMES) students, the course is intended to offer not only an overview of engineering disciplines and ethics, but simple examples of problem solving.
“The purpose of this project is to allow the teams to expand their creative horizons, give them the opportunity to design something unique, require them to take a systematic and iterative approach to arriving at a workable prototype design,” said Zerda, PROMES director and instructional assistant professor at the college. “This is a project about developing an understanding of moving parts, balance and the action-reaction of forces.”
For freshman students Minnie Martinez, Jonathan Cortez, Tamara Espinosa and Anirban Bhaumik, the idea to create “Stampa-Palooza” came after weeks spent brainstorming ideas.
Capable of stamping a piece of paper, the project used the force of a swinging Yo-Yo to move a marble down a slide into a bowl. The weight of the marble dropped the Styrofoam bowl, attached to a pulley system crafted from CDs, down. This launched a matchbox car down a track, which hit a stick and triggered the stamper to make contact with the paper.
“The project helped us apply the scheduling techniques taught in class,” said Espinosa, an industrial engineering major. She noted coordinating the schedules of four different people also taught them a lot about teamwork, a skill many engineers utilize regularly in the field.
Coleman Rink, a freshman biomedical engineering major, and his group toiled just two weekend days making the "MacFish Feeder Xtreme." Constructed from an assortment of items that included cardboard boxes, mousetraps and dowel rods, the project used the vibration of a cellular phone to start the steps necessary to drop fish food into a bowl filled with a live goldfish.
Rink called the project a great teambuilding exercise.
“You all have your own ideas about how to do things,” he said, ”but you really learn time management, scheduling and how to work with other people.”