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As a Nord Anglia Education School, BIS HCMC is connected with our sister schools all over the world through our Global Campus Platform. All students and staff are able to access this platform to download resources, take part in competitions and challenges, and to connect and share with other NAE students. Global Campus is split into three areas for our Early Years and Infants children (GC Junior), our Juniors and Key Stage 3 and 4 students (GC Core), and our Key Stage 5 students (GC Senior), with a range of activities available for all age groups. On Friday 8th October we took on one of the Global Campus Challenges as a school, with students from Early Years through to Year 7 engaging in the Rube Goldberg Challenge!
The Rube Goldberg machine is named after Rube Goldberg, an artist and cartoonist who created a character who became famous for his outlandish contraptions to perform very simple tasks. In fact, Rube Goldberg is the only person to ever be featured in the Merriam Webster dictionary as an adjective! If you’re interested in finding out more about the man behind the machines, click here.
One of our favourite Global Campus Challenges tasks students with creating their own Rube Goldberg machine to perform a simple action, such as squeezing toothpaste from a tube or watering a plant. It involves lining up a series of objects that will knock, roll, bump, tap, and nudge their way to a final outcome. On Friday 8th October we held our first Global Campus Challenge Day for all BIS primary students and Year 7 to try out their creative problem solving skills and tackle this!
It has been great to see children from 2 years old to 7 year olds taking on the challenge to “Water a Plant’. Some families worked together and others worked with Mum and Dad to create some very imaginative designs. All of them used enquiry, perseverance and reflection. Mr Ian launched the challenge in the assembly. He showed his Rube Goldberg Machine that he had made at home and said today was also about having fun. Hearing children check in throughout the day and at the celebration time we can definitely say children have had a lot of fun. Watching the videos it has been great to hear our youngest children explaining what they have done using scientific language. Children have also said “it failed many times” and this is a great lesson to learn.
On the Junior Campus, over 500 students chose to create a Rube Goldberg Machine from one of four different challenges waiting for them on the Global Campus website: ‘Watering a Plant’, ‘Dropping a Ball into a Cup’, ‘Popping a Balloon’ or ‘Closing a Door’. Some students even went beyond what we had asked for, and completed a challenge that we felt was beyond Primary students, ‘Turning off a Light’. The results that have been returned highlight just how enthusiastic our students are on the Junior Campus, but also how important it is to let our creativity blossom beyond the screen during this period of online learning. One of the real joys of looking back at our submitted entries was to observe the increasing complexity of the machines as we moved up the Junior Campus year groups, and yet, the joy of creating a working machine was exactly the same - the yelp of joy when the machine worked was just a big in Year 6 as it was in Year 3! We are so incredibly proud of all the students that took part, and are now looking forward to the next Global Campus Challenge Day!
We also took on the same Rube Goldberg challenges as a House Challenge Day, but added an extra element: our Year 7 students were given the extra challenge of working online in teams to create a joint Rube Goldberg machine. Not only did they have to problem solve and create their own section, but they also needed to connect and work with the other members of the group to create one long video. Each group had a Team Leader, a Team Scribe, a Storyboard Coordinator, and an Editor, and together they planned, prototyped, recorded and edited their final Rube Goldberg video. This required a lot of patience, team work, trial-and-error, and excellent communication skills. Year 7 overcame the challenges of working online, solving wifi and technology issues, in order to develop their final creations. The most important part of the day was that they joined in groups and learnt more about their classmates and how they could work together.
As one Year 7 said in their reflections: “I have learnt what all of my classmates are like and we all learnt a lot about physics and how gravity works. Most important of all, we had lots of fun!”
Stay tuned for more Global Campus challenges.
Lauren Binnington
Deputy Head Teacher (Enrichment - Whole School)
