Laziness is the Mother of Invention

The last few weeks, in freshmen science, we've been studying work, power, and the conservation of energy. Instead of a test, they have a project and a paper for this unit. Their goal was to build a Rube Goldberg device (named after a cartoonist famous for creating unnecessarily complicated machines to complete a simple task). Since I've assigned this project for 3 years now, I figured I should build one of my own. I often find myself having to walk ALL the way across the classroom to turn off the front light switch during class...so I came up with a "simpler" way. It might be a little hard to understand what's going on, so first I filmed an explanation of the steps, backwards--and then the machine in action. Also, for a link to one of the best such devices ever made, click here.