AVI in Action: When a Chain Reaction Has a Job to Do

Oct 1

4 min read

In Week 2 of AVI’s Rube Goldberg challenge, students moved from making things happen to figuring out how to make them happen on purpose.

This is the second entry in AVI in Action, a recurring CAMP series following Alabama Virtual Institute students through a semester of building, testing, and revising.

The plan was simple: line up enough dominoes to push a toy car and let the car carry the chain reaction forward.

During the Week 2 presentation, one group explained what happened instead. “The most challenging part for us was getting the dominoes to push the car,” one student said. They added more dominoes near the car and tried again, but it still would not move the way they expected.

Eventually, the group changed the setup. The car would push the dominoes instead.

“Way to pivot,” one AVI leader told them.

Week 2 raised the challenge in a small but useful way. Students were still building, testing, and revising, but now their chain reactions had to accomplish a task.

Now the Dominoes Had to Do Something

The week’s objectives asked students to create a domino course, use it to accomplish a task, and demonstrate cause and effect through dominoes and simple machines.

That left plenty for the students to decide.

Groups brainstormed what they wanted their course to accomplish, designed a path using at least 30 dominoes, tested it, made changes, and tested again. By the next work session, the questions had shifted toward improvement: How could the dominoes work better? How could the design be more interesting? What needed to change before presentation day?

Students came up with very different possibilities. At Watwood, one student suggested using the dominoes to trigger a photo at the end of the course. Another imagined sending a ball into a hole like putt-putt. A third wanted to create a trick that incorporated turns.

Once the course had an end goal, students had more to think about than lining pieces up. The spacing mattered. The direction mattered. The next object had to respond the way they expected. If it did not, the group had to figure out why.

The toy car made that problem especially clear. The group could see what was happening in front of them, and adding more dominoes was not solving it. Changing the mechanism did.

The Words Started Showing Up in the Work

Early in the week, students explored chain reaction, cause and effect, potential energy, kinetic energy, energy transfer, and momentum. The Zoom chat began filling with those terms as students watched examples and identified what they were seeing.

Then they had to work with the ideas themselves.

A domino falls into another domino. A ball needs enough movement to reach a target. A car sits still when students expected it to move. Every part of the course gives the group something observable to talk about.

“Cause and effect” is easier to talk about when the effect is sitting on the table in front of you.

Students Started Watching How Other Machines Worked

Presentation day gave students more designs to study than the ones at their own tables.

AVI leaders brought sites onto the screen, ran the reactions, and then asked students to talk about what they had built. The prompts included what they liked, what challenged them, what they learned, and how the week’s work might connect to the next Rube Goldberg challenge.

Some of the most interesting comments were about other groups.

Students at PC Bridges 4A noticed the speed of Holt’s reaction and the simplicity of another group’s design. Other projects drew comments for their large dominoes and for working cars and trains into the chain reaction.

For an educator listening, those observations create useful places to keep the conversation going. What made one course faster? Why did the simpler one work? What did another group do that you might try next time?

Students do not have to build identical machines to learn from one another’s decisions. In this case, the differences gave them more to notice.

The conversation also included what happens when the people building the machine make mistakes. Students suggested helping someone when something does not work, offering ideas, using encouraging words, and reminding one another that mistakes are part of learning.

A little later, while groups were still presenting, Meadowview dropped a message into the chat:

“good job guys keep going!!!”

It was a small moment, but it fit the week. Students had spent several days resetting dominoes, changing ideas, and watching other groups do the same.

What to Listen for After the Reaction

A successful run is easy to celebrate. The conversation after the run can tell us much more about what students understood.

Ask a student what happened and you may hear a description of the course. Ask what they expected to happen, where the design stopped working, and what they changed afterward, and the explanation starts revealing the decisions behind it.

That is what made the car story useful.

The interesting part was not simply that the students eventually found a configuration that worked. They could identify the part of the design that was giving them trouble and explain the change they made in response.

Those are worthwhile questions in almost any hands-on learning experience: What did you expect to happen? What actually happened? What did you change after you saw it? What would you try next?

The finished product still matters. So does the student’s ability to make sense of how they got there.

The Next Piece of the Machine

These domino courses will not stand alone for long.

Throughout the semester, AVI students are building weekly projects that will eventually connect into what the lesson materials call “one giant wacky machine.” That means the work from one week can become experience students draw from when the next mechanism creates a different problem.

Week 2 will not be the last time something refuses to move. A semester built around Rube Goldberg machines will give students plenty more opportunities to reset a course, reconsider an idea, watch what another group tried, and figure out what to do next.

The falling dominoes were the part everyone could see. The work was in figuring out what needed to happen next.

Learn More

AVI in Action: Why Starting Small Matters, the first installment of this series, follows students through the opening week of the semester’s Rube Goldberg challenge.
Alabama Virtual Institute on CAMP’s programs page.