Engineering Club Thrills Audience

The Middle School Engineering Club is a fun and exciting club inspired by Rube Goldberg’s comic genius.  Mr. Goldberg, an engineer and cartoonist during the mid 20th century, was most famous for his cartoon drawings of complex contraptions.  A Rube Goldberg contraption – an elaborate set of arms, wheels, gears, handles, cups and rods, put in motion by balls, canary cages, pails, boots, bathtubs, paddles and live animals – takes a simple task and makes it extraordinarily complicated. 

In Engineering Club, each student has an opportunity to use his or her God given imagination, creativity, and ingenuity to design and construct a single step in the machine.  The group then works together to link all of the parts together into a complicated series of chain reactions ending in our very simple task of ringing a desk top bell (and pushing an Easy button).

Rube Goldberg in the dictionary is defined as “a comically involved, complicated invention, laboriously contrived to perform a simple operation”…a definition that would also apply to Engineering Club!