AVI in Action: Why Starting Small Matters

Sep 24

5 min read

What a Rube Goldberg machine can show us about how students learn.

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

Pinecrest 5th had one of those engineering moments that almost felt designed for an audience.

Their Rube Goldberg machine had been built. The students were ready to show it. Then the camera came on, and the machine decided not to cooperate.

A few minutes later, the site dropped an update into the Zoom chat, still using its own shorthand for the group:

“It worked the minute the camera was off 🤣”

They were not the only students still tinkering. One Pinecrest student asked to come back on screen because the group had made a few changes and wanted everyone to see what they had done differently.

For the first week of a semester-long engineering project, that may have been more useful than a machine that worked perfectly the first time.

Starting Small on Purpose

Week 1 of this semester's Alabama Virtual Institute (AVI) engineering unit gave students a deliberately small starting point: use basic materials already available at their site to build a miniature Rube Goldberg machine.

The core challenge asked students to move an item through the machine and into a cup, but the lesson also pushed them to imagine what else a machine could eventually do. Could it turn a page? Flip a switch? Complete some other simple task in the most complicated way possible?

And the lesson did not ask students to take any of it too seriously. From the beginning, they were asked why engineering should be fun, even when the idea is a little ridiculous. They learned about simple machines and chain reactions, then worked with whatever they could find: paper clips, tape, balls, things that rolled or stacked, and anything else that might help a design work.

The smallness matters because this is not the final project. AVI students will spend the semester adding to what they know and what they can build, eventually working toward a much larger Rube Goldberg machine. Week 1 gives them room to make decisions, see what happens, and change course while the problem is still manageable.

When the First Idea Doesn't Work

One Pinecrest group could explain exactly where its machine was breaking down.

The ball was not moving through the course the way students wanted, so they changed the elevation of an inclined plane and raised the slope. As they talked through the design, they also explained that the machine had grown from ideas contributed by several different groups rather than from one student's plan.

Then another problem showed up.

The ball could reach the basket, but sometimes it bounced back out. So students added barriers around the target to keep it in place.

That is the part of engineering that can disappear if we only look at the finished product. The final machine shows what students built. The adjustments show how they were thinking.

The lesson itself asks students to build, test, improve, make final adjustments, and test again. In practice, those verbs looked like students changing an incline, adding a barrier, resetting materials, borrowing an idea, and trying one more time.

What Students Built, Changed, and Learned

Across the Zoom rooms, the machines looked different because the students' ideas were different.

At PC Bridges, one response in the chat captured the spirit of the week in a single sentence:

“Adding more will help us figure out what works and what doesn't.”

Later, the site shared that students especially liked figuring out different ways to make their projects work better and working with friends to come up with ideas.

Elsewhere, students were already looking beyond the machines sitting in front of them. When asked what a larger Rube Goldberg machine might eventually do, students imagined everything from a vending machine to a robot. Another student was already thinking about using a pulley.

That kind of thinking matters in Week 1. Students are not supposed to know exactly what the final machine will become yet. They are beginning to see possibilities.

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What a Leader Might Notice

If you only watched to see whether the ball made it into the cup, you would miss much of what happened.

Students were using technical vocabulary to explain why a design needed to change. They were combining ideas from multiple groups. They were identifying what had gone wrong during a test and deciding what to adjust next.

They were also learning from students who were not in the same room.

During the presentation, AVI leaders tried a new format that brought multiple sites onto the screen together and encouraged students to talk about each other's designs. The idea was not simply to give every group its turn to present. Students could look at another machine as a fresh set of eyes, ask questions, and pick up ideas they might use later.

At one point, a Pinecrest student did exactly that, asking another group how they had positioned part of their design so the ball would stay on course instead of falling or bouncing out. The other group explained what they had done.

That exchange is easy to overlook, but it may be one of the more interesting things that happened all week. The presentation stopped being only a place to show finished work. Another group's project became information students could use.

Students described the experience in simpler terms. One said a favorite part was “working together with my friends.” Another said it was “using my creativity.”

The Machine Gets Bigger From Here

Week 1 did not produce one perfect Rube Goldberg machine.

It was never supposed to.

Some machines worked. Some worked only after students changed something. One apparently worked beautifully as soon as the camera was turned off. Another group wanted a second chance to present because its students had already revised the design.

That is a useful place to begin.

Over the coming weeks, AVI students will add more materials, more variables, more moving parts, and more complexity. They will encounter new problems that cannot be solved exactly the way they solved the last one. And they will have an entire semester to keep building on what they learn.

We will be following that progression here, not simply to show what students make, but to pay attention to what changes between one attempt and the next.

A cardboard ramp, a cup, or a row of dominoes does not tell us much on its own.

What students do when the ball goes the wrong direction might.