Resumen de Rube Goldberg machines and STEM education: a Brazilian case study
Pedro Zany Caldeira, Ana Paula Bossler
In a Media & Education course of a Mathematics and a Natural Sciences undergraduate programmes, two teams of four students had to develop from scratch a Rube Goldberg machine with at least 10 steps that embodied several types of knowledge from at least two natural sciences (for instance, Chemistry and Physics), which included one scientific experiment. Students also needed to explain to their peers in the other team the content knowledge embodied in their machine and the experimental results they obtained from the machine. One team developed a 10-step Rube Goldberg machine that included knowledge from Chemistry and Physics and that ended with a Chemical experiment (an up-side-down glass descends over a candle in the middle of a dish full of water; when the candle was extinguished the oxygen was substituted by water). At first the students of this team could not fully explain the result: they mentioned air pressure differences but did not explain why pressure is involved. The other team developed a 11-step Rube Goldberg machine that included only knowledge from Physics and Mathematics, and as its ninth step showed an experiment (the energy needed to overcome the resistance of gravity). The students failed to explain the experiment. Using the variation theory of learning principles, the lecturer asked students for full scientific explanations to be presented to their classmates three days later. The students, on the occasion, explained the experiment very satisfactorily.
