Just get them started with launching a teddy bear off the dresser by knocking over a stack of books with a nerf gun dart and see where they take it from there! Making Rube Goldberg machines is a great way to entertain children when they aren’t in school. I’m sure it was much more fun to make that one than to clean it up! One family made a complex machine throughout the house that ended with a foosball goal. Some took a humorous look at social distancing by creating machines to allow space for simple tasks like passing the salt across the table without getting near each other. In fact, in 2020, during COVID quarantines, homemade Rube Goldberg machines became particularly popular on YouTube. Schools aren’t the only places making these contraptions. What can you trigger with a running blow dryer? What can you use to turn it on? How can you get a toy car rolling down a track? Anything you can think of is game. Search through the garage, the toy box, and the attic, and you will find all sorts of possible machine elements. You can include objects that have various weights, string and rope, duct tape, broken pieces of toys, kitchen utensils, balloons, and anything laying around that seems to have no use. Gather up anything you have around the house that moves or can be made to move. A lot of different construction sets could be used to make crazy contraptions, even if that wasn’t their original intent.īut, of course, you don’t need a special product to make a Rube Goldberg contraption. All of these trigger a chain reaction, the key Goldberg feature, from one little push, drop, or other action. 7 YouTubeĪny toys that use chain reactions could be considered Rube Goldberg in style: marble runs or roller coasters, Lego contraptions, and domino chains. The egg on Uncle Sam’s face and various people booted out of the room express something about the election that we might feel. There is no “A” telling us where to start or end. This is a very Rube Goldberg-like cartoon on the first take, but looking closely, you can see that skips are stepped-alphabet letters are missing. Some of the more recent artistic conceptions don’t even show a machine that works but instead express frustration, chaos, or other emotions about a topic in a machine-like way, as seen in Election Recap by Peter Kuper.

Others are a little more abstract or surreal and just have Goldberg-like elements, like Vanessa Bates’s Klockwerk Orange Patent Pending or Mike Savad’s Steampunk-Coffee Break. For example, Clint Hansen’s, A Simple Coffee Machine. In some cases, the artwork clearly portrays a Goldberg machine. Other artists have taken on the challenge and included Goldberg-type machines in their own artwork. Goldberg himself created over 50,000 cartoons that included his crazy machines.

Trick shot the incredible machine 3