By Lach Howarth

Featured image: Building Rube Goldberg machine elements at the YWCA Canberra Clubhouse.

The second week of our January school holiday program was Rube Goldberg week! We spent 3 days designing and constructing a Rube Goldberg machine in the Clubhouse from a wide range of materials we’d managed to collect from around the Clubhouse and Lanyon Youth and Community Centre, another of the YWCA’s Youth Centres. Some of the favourite materials to work with were marbles, cups, home made pulleys and meccano.

We started day one with some designs on paper. I asked the members to design the ultimate section of a Rube Goldberg machine if time and money were not a concern. We had some fantastic concepts put down on paper including one that involved a wormhole and time travel

Angus’ time travelling Rube Goldberg machine design.

After designing some crazy, unrealistic ideas, we moved on to some more reasonable ones using the materials available in the Clubhouse. We then started trying out some of the ideas and that was a lot of fun. Slowly but surely we started getting better at putting together stages of our Rube Goldberg machine and it was starting to take form. We worked on individual sections over two days, slowly piecing them together to form one big Rube Goldberg machine. Once we were happy with the design we started trying to film our final video of the whole machine working and achieving the end goal of “making a ding”. It took 13 attemps of the final machine but we did it! Here’s the footage of the construction and final completion of our final Rube Goldberg machine:

Thanks to everyone who participated in what was a very fun school holiday program and we hope all the members have as much fun throughout this new year as they did these school holidays!