 "Photo: Coleman Morefield")
Look Ma, no hands.
About 170 Texas Tech engineering students flexed their mechanical muscles Friday afternoon in the Civil Engineering building during a presentation of Rube Goldberg machines, complicated contraptions with the seemingly simple task of moving a small object two inches onto a platform.
The devices used a broad array of different household objects that, when linked together, moved the small objects.
"The students really seem to enjoy it," said Phillip Nash, an instructor in the Department of the College of Engineering. "It gives them a chance to express their creativity."
Nash said he has assigned the Rube Goldberg machine project to students in his Civil Engineering Seminar class for about eight years.
The guidelines for the project: The machines must contain at least two moving parts and must consist of eight steps.
Approximately 52 teams of four students demonstrated their machines, which used objects ranging from balloons to turkey basters to popsicle sticks to a functioning toy helicopter next to a mouse trap.
During one of the presentations, a "toy vehicle" hit a spinner. The spinner hit a marble that then moved down a shaft but did not emerge at the other end.
The class waited in silence, anticipating the next step.
Several members of the class cheered as they waited until the group nudged the marble, setting off the next chain reaction that led to a small electrical motor pulling the cube up a ramp.
"It was pretty tough," said Nolan Williams, a freshman civil engineering major from Iowa Park who demonstrated his Rube Goldberg machine during Friday's class. "It was more the design than the actual building of it. Once you had it down on paper, it wasn't too hard to build."
Most of the students in the class are freshmen, Nash said, and the project gives them an opportunity to learn the importance of teamwork during the engineering process.
"It's about solving a problem that has been given to us," said Ana Santiago, a freshman architecture and civil engineering major from Austin. "It's about working together to create the resources to solve the problem. It was a problem-solving exercise."
He said the assignment also gives students an opportunity to meet one another, though the advantages of the assignment go far beyond social aspects.
"All along the way, they found that engineering is all about trial and error," Nash said. "There's no textbook answer to some problems, and some students are really good with their hands, and you can tell."
Nash said he expects to spend between 12 and 24 hours grading the 52 Rube Goldberg gizmos presented this year. He videotaped the machines in action for later review.
"Did it work?" Nash asked the camera operator after one presentation. "See. It was so fast I didn't see a thing."
He said he designs the grading rubric with a strategy in mind: Keep it ambiguous so students have no choice but to design the machines from square one, so "they have to use their mind and question things."
When asked what they plan to do with their group's machine after its demonstration and grading, one pair of students paused to consider their options.
"Light it on fire," joked Jessica Morgan, a civil engineering and architecture major from Houston.
"Throw it away," continued her teammate, Patrick Sisemore, a junior architecture and civil engineering major from Colleyville. "I don't need anything to push a cube. If I could get it to do my homework or something, that'd be cool. I'd keep that."
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