Middle School Rube Goldberg Team Delights in Storytelling

Earlier this month, a group of SCH Middle Schoolers traveled to the Bok Building in South Philadelphia to compete in the Philadelphia Contraption Contest after months of refining their Rube Goldberg machine and its tie-in to the nation’s 250th anniversary. The team’s hard work and creativity paid off, as SCH took home the Best Storytelling award for weaving a narrative of the American Revolution into their mechanical design. (Points for theatricality!)

The competition challenged students to find that "special crossroads where art meets science and engineering meets storytelling," according to Contraption. Rather than seeking efficiency, the goal was to design a Rube Goldberg machine that answered the question: “How can a machine be made to accomplish a task in the most circuitous, most delightful way possible?” This year, the specific mission was to ring a bell in celebration of the Liberty Bell and the Semiquincentennial.

Teachers Colin Doyle and Eileen Larkin hosted practices during WIN time as a science enrichment, guiding the students as they collaborated to build a machine that both performed a physical task and told a story.

“The students had a lot of fun building the machine and participating in the competition. There were teams from all over the city there, and a lot of humor in the different machines,” said Doyle. SCH’s presentation featured a Rube Goldberg-style sequence where a ball knocked a "King George" figure off a platform, triggering a mechanical eagle. "Whenever Nick Chapman '32 would present on it," said Doyle, "he would flap his wings like an eagle."

The machines sparked joy in the students, said the teachers, and offered hands-on experiential learning that defines the SCH curriculum.

“It was a lot of fun working together with my teammates,” participant Grayson Wright '32. “We got to be creative and hang out and solve problems."

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