After School Enrichment

After School Enrichment - Winter Program - Rube Goldberg
Posted on 04/02/2019
Hoosic Valley Elementary and WSWHE Boces have teamed up to provide a great series of after school STEM enrichment programs for 3rd and 4th graders.  They offer a fall, winter and spring program.  Their winter program featuring Rube Goldberg machines has just wrapped up and the kids did a great job explaining how their machines were created and showing how they work.  

Check out their machines - the challenge was to feed the  Madagascar Hissing Cockroach.

A Rube Goldberg machine is a contraption, invention, device or apparatus that is deliberately over-engineered or overdone to perform a very simple task in a very complicated fashion, usually including a chain reaction. In this program students worked as teams to design, develop and build their own Rube Goldberg Machine. This program involved an in-depth study of simple machines, how they work, and what there uses are.  Students shared ideas with other groups and had an opportunity to strengthen their communication and collaboration skills. Students used problem solving strategies as they troubleshot their designs, learning as engineers do...how to cope with failures. This program offered great opportunities for students to develop the capacity to go back to the initial problem and come up with various approaches to solving the challenge.  
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