Contraption Challenge teaches creativity

A group of sixth-graders showed off the mechanical inventions they?ve been making over the past seven weeks at a science fair at Lincoln Elementary School Tuesday night. About 70 people attended the event at which eight teams of budding scientists took turns demonstrated their devices for the audience.

The program is an after-school extracurricular activity known as ?Contraption Challenge.? It was started three years ago by fourth-grade teacher Julie Timmins and sixth-grade teacher Nancy Clawson. Clawson said she got the idea for the program at a National Science Teachers Conference. She thought it would be something the sixth graders would enjoy, and it would fit in nicely with their unit on Rube Goldberg. She said Goldberg was a cartoonist famous for drawing pictures of complex gadgets performing simple tasks.

Twenty-four students participate in Contraption Challenge and they are divided into eight groups of three people. Each group randomly draws a task they have to complete. Some of the tasks they had to complete this year were casting a fishing pole, washing a dish, raising a flag, feeding a pet and catching a mouse. The team has to build a contraption that executes the task using a minimum of three simple machines and five steps.

Goldberg is best known for a series of popular cartoons depicting complex gadgets that perform simple tasks in indirect, convoluted ways.

The program was funded through a $2,500 grant from the Washington County Riverboat Foundation and a $1,500 grant from the Corridor STEM Initiative.