My daddy is a genius

It's true, my daddy it a genius, as you will see later in this post.

So, the boys are both in the gifted program at their school, and for the past couple of weeks have been doing this "Rube Goldberg" project. I myself had never heard of Rube Goldberg before this, but you can google it, or search for it on youtube and check out the crazy inventions. What I can compare it to, or relate it to, is Pee Wee's big adventure, where he built those inventions that triggered each new action that cooked his breakfast, and fed his dog and such? The boys were told to build a series of "actions", there had to be at least 6 of them. And only one human caused action, so each action had to be caused by another of the actions, which was to result in putting out a candle. It was supposed to last at least 10 seconds and no more than 3 minutes. It had to include at least 3 simple machines (pulley, lever, etc). Now, this was pretty complex for a 3rd and 5th grader!!! And of course with me wrappng up student teaching, I really didn't have much time to put into it, so I do what I do best..... I went to my daddy.

My daddy is a builder. He builds things all the time. He amazes me. He built a purple car when I was a teenager, looked like the flintstone mobile without any doors or windows, the back seat sitting higher than the front seats, it was so awesome and fun to ride around in. He has also built a trike. When he needs something, he just takes some measurements, and builds something. It amazes me. He has so much creativity and ingenuity, it just blows me away. I always make my boys go out to the garage to help Papa work whenever I can, in hopes that some of his talent will rub off onto them. Anyways, I digress....

We came to Papa with this task 3 days before it was due (bad momma, I know....) but of course my daddy pulled it off (with one all nighter to boot the night before! He stayed up alll night to make sure the boys had it to take to school, what a great Papa).

Now, I tried to convince the boys right away to build one machine, and use it in each of their classes (although they are in the "same" gifted class, obviously Roman goes with the 3rd graders and Bourbon goes with the 5th graders, at different times). But Bourbn was against this. He was determined to do his own thing. So actually Roman paired with Papa, and Bourbon with Alan. Although unfortunately, Alan works so much that he didnt get a chance to work on it much at all with Bourbon, which left Bourbon to his own for his project. I tried to help some, but I am just not mechanically inclined at all. Which is crazy since my daddy is, but perhaps that is why I am not, I've never had to be, if something breaks, I go to my daddy, if I need something built, I go to my daddy..... I've never had to be mechanically inclined!!

So anyways, it was so interesting to watch the boys work on this project. They drew up plans, came up with different ideas. Bourbon had soo many creative ideas, he is really smart. But he doesn't like to try things more than once or twice, if it won't work, he just assumes it is impossible and gives up and tries something new. Roman, gets so frustrated and angry and emotional when things don't work out, but he will try and try and try and try and try until he gets it down. He doesn't give up. He will stick with something until he has mastered it.

Bourbon had this really good idea, and he worked on it, and tried new things until he ended up with a lego car, with a wet Q-tip attached to it, being pushed into the candle to put out the flame. It was a good idea, but he just couldn't get it to work just right. Either the dominos wouldn't fall properly (and boy did he get mad setting up those dominos over and over again, lol) or the car would veer off away from the candle and not reach it, or something. Here was a sample of his attempt:



So in the end, he ended up just doing Roman's & Papa's during his class too.

Which was this awesome thing!

Here is the explanation of how it works, but I am a genius and accidentally stopped the video just as it is going off, lol. :


And here it is actually going off:



You can clearly see, my daddy is a genius. :) As you can see, it was only like 5 seconds, not the 10 that it was supposed to be. BUT only 3 contraptions (including ours) were actually brought in to class, and ours was the only one that actually put out the candle, so the fact that it didn't last as long as it should was overlooked. I wish I could have been there to video tape it in action in class, but I had to be at UCO for portfolio day yesterday when they did it.

I am going to keep this cool contraption, and use this project in my future classroom now!! Woo hoo!!