Burlington--Vermont 4-H invites students in Grades 3-12 to explore their creativity, ingenuity and engineering skills through two contests, the Rube Goldberg Challenge and Create Your Own Invention Contest.
The deadline for both contests is February 19. Details and links for registration (required to access the Flipgrid contest site) can be found at www.uvm.edu/extension/youth/announcements. One winner in each age group (Grades 3-5, 6-8 and 9-12) will be selected for each contest and will receive a $50 gift certificate.
For the Rube Goldberg Challenge, students are asked to build their own Rube Goldberg machine, named for the late American cartoonist who designed crazy contraptions with a number of unrelated devices and steps to perform a simple task in a complicated, inefficient way.
Participants in this challenge will become familiar with six simple machines and basic energy transfer and learn about the engineering design process and backwards design. Working alone or in groups of up to four in their age group, they then will create and film their own Rube Goldberg machine completing a task such as watering a plant or putting coins in a piggy bank.
Each machine should be made from everyday household items and have a minimum of 10 steps. It also must employ three different types of simple machines from the contest list, which includes incline plane, wedge, screw, wheel and axle, lever and pulley, and be able to accomplish the same task without human intervention at least twice.
Using a phone or camera, students should record a video of the machine working successfully and upload it to the Rube Goldberg Challenge Flipgrid on the contest website.
The Create Your Own Invention contest encourages students to test their problem-solving, critical thinking and engineering skills by identifying a problem and then brainstorming, planning and designing an invention. A set of guidelines will help participants define a problem and walk them through the steps to solve by asking questions about purpose, uniqueness, cost of materials and logistics.
To enter, students are required to produce a short video (three minutes or less) describing their invention and showing diagrams to demonstrate how it works.
The winning entries will be available for viewing on both the Vermont 4-H and University of Vermont (UVM) College of Engineering and Mathematical Sciences Facebook pages during National Engineering Week (February 20-26).
If questions, contact Lauren Traister, UVM Extension 4-H Teen and Leadership Program coordinator, at (802) 888-4972, ext. 402. To request a disability-related accommodation to participate, please call by February 1.