Push, Roll, Drop!

Create a Christmas chain reaction!

The ‘Chain Reaction’ is a hands-on activity inspired by Rube Goldberg’s cartoons. Rube Goldberg was an American inventor best known for his cartoon inventions which illustrated how you can complete an extremely simple task by using a chain reaction. He never actually built the inventions he drew…but he inspired people all over the world to follow in his footsteps by building the most amazing yet excessively complicated chain reactions!

Rube Goldberg Cartoon. Image from: https://www.rubegoldberg.com/the-man-behind-the-machine/

Nowadays kids and adults all over the world are making their own Rube Goldberg inspired chain reactions! Science teachers use chain reaction activities to teach energy concepts, companies use it as a teambuilding activity, and bands such as OK-Go spend months (yes…months!) designing and building chain reactions in warehouses for their music videos!

OK Go – This Too Shall Pass – Rube Goldberg Machine – Official Video

Get your materials ready!

To build your chain reaction, you can use any materials that you can find lying around your home. All chain reactions usually involve the following:

1. Things to use as building material
2. Objects that move and roll
3. Ramps and slides – these will help keep your chain reaction moving and will also influence the speed of a rolling object
4. Objects of different weights
5. Things that you can use to connect everything together such as string or rubber bands

List of resources which you might have at home:

• Cardboard
• Shoe boxes
• Cable ties
• String
• Cups
• Tape
• Scissors
• Glue
• Rubber bands
• Wood clothes pegs
• Wooden pieces
• Popsicle sticks
• Toilet paper tubes
• Bottles
• Recycled materials
• Wooden skewers
• Books
• Pieces of pipes – plastic/foam/metal
• Building kits such as Lego, K’NEX, Meccano or anything else you have available at home
• Toys with wheels
• Tennis balls
• Ping-Pong balls
• Toys that move
• Pulleys
• Marbles
• Tinfoil
• Magnets
• Domino blocks
• Weights such as nuts & bolts & washers

And anything else you can think of. You can also use crafts material and Christmas decorations to decorate your Christmas Chain Reaction.

Try it out!

Chain reactions are a great way of getting together as a family during the Christmas holidays to see who can build the longest, most creative, and most complicated chain reaction.

There’s more than one way of building a chain reaction but the basics always remain the same. One movement needs to trigger the next movement to carry out a simple task at the end. It’s a fun and hands-on way of exploring cause and effect!

Below we’ve included a few steps of how you can carry out this activity at home – but feel free to change the steps in any way you want!

Step 1:

We suggest you first introduce what a Rube Goldberg machine is & what a chain reaction is. The below video is a chain reaction built by a Form 3 student from St.Paul’s Missionary College. Observe how each part of the invention is linked to each other and how there is always something moving from one place to another. Amazing right?

You can also use the links below to watch online videos of people who built chain reactions, including some easier chain reactions which are suitable for younger kids.

• Sesame Street: Rube Goldberg Machines! https://youtu.be/pMpmit5YMcg
• Easy Rube Goldberg Ideas: Easy Rube Goldberg Machine for Kids: https://youtu.be/ICv5owYrW4w
• Design and Build a Rube Goldberg https://youtu.be/6aFVbjwA_y4
• Rube Goldberg: The TRASH Machine https://youtu.be/xHrYypDKXTc

Step 2:

Most Rube Goldberg chain reactions are built to carry out a really simple task in the most complicated way imaginable.

You can create a chain reaction machine:

• To feed your pet if you’re away for one day
• To turn on/off the TV if you don’t feel like getting up
• To switch on some Christmas lights or a lamp
• To make a sandwich when you’re busy working on your homework
• To open/close the curtain in the morning to wake you up
• To water your plants if away for a few days.

These are just a few examples. You can create chain reactions to carry out any simple task!

Step 3:

Follow the design process to plan your chain reaction. We suggest you constantly test, re-design and re-build to fix any problem or challenge that you encounter along the way.

Step 4:

Use your resources and start building!

We built a medium scale chain reaction across the kitchen to switch on a kettle!

Take it further!

The beauty of this project is that you can make it as challenging as you want. Here are a few ideas how:

1. STEPS: Decide on the number of steps that your machine will have. The more steps you have, the longer and more complicated your chain reaction will be. For example, a creation which has 3 steps might involve a marble rolling down a ramp, dropping on a seesaw, which in turn catapults it to a bowl.

2. TIME: Challenge yourself and incorporate ways of how you can slow down moving objects between one step and another to make the chain reaction take longer.

3. MATERIALS: Be creative and think outside the box – how can different objects be used? How many uses does each object have?

4. COLLABORATION: You can either work together as a family to build one machine or else each family member can create their own individual chain reaction. If you choose the latter, encourage teamwork by connecting each individual chain reaction into one single Rube Goldberg machine.

5. SCIENCE CONCEPTS: Explore the science behind your creation: Chain reactions are perfect for exploring energy concepts such as different forms of energy, energy transfer and conservation of energy.

Show us what you’ve made! Take a photo of at least 4 of your favourite activities from Esplora’s Science Advent Calendar. Trust us, you’ll need them later!