Thursday, March 7, 2013

Rube Goldberg Projects

Welcome to the blog about the about Rube Goldberg Project.  First I have to apologize about for a mistake that I recently realized that I made.  SMILE has been working with team of three outstanding Mechanical Engineering (ME)  Seniors who are building a Rube Goldberg Project to help meet the completion requirements for their degree as well as provide a engaging machine for the students to play with.  Due to the fact that we were not having a OSU based challenge where the ME students could present their project to the middle school students, we decided to have the ME students create a series of videos outlining their project and progress to share with the middle school students.  The ME students did a fabulous job creating these videos and are continuing to do so.  My plan to was to email links all the SMILE Middle School teachers at regular intervals to show to their clubs and help motivate them to build their Rube Goldberg machines.  The problem occurred when I sent out links to the videos.  What I have discovered is I used an incorrect variation of the middle school list serve and the emails were sent to a "bounce" list instead of the teachers.  This problem was further confounded when I used the original email to send the all the others.  I should have realized when I did not get any feedback about the videos, but I did not.  I realized this mistake yesterday and have quickly put together this blog so you have the links to all the videos that the ME students have worked so hard to put together.  I am hopeful there is enough time for you to be able to share them with your students and I truly apologize for letting this happen.

The first videos introducing the students and  are located in the "Mechanical Engineering Team" tab.  All the weekly construction videos are located in the "ME Team Weekly Project Videos" tab.  I will continue to update this blog with more videos as the ME students complete them as well as providing more information about the Rube Goldberg Project itself. 

Looking forward to seeing all you Middle School Teachers next week the SMILE teacher workshop.