One of the projects for the 5th grade Art curriculum is to "Depict an imaginative mechanical process of a personal technological object." I use this opportunity to teach about the cartoonist Rube Goldberg and his drawings of silly machines that perform simple tasks in absurd, complex ways. We look at many of Goldberg's machines and then the children draw and write descriptions of their own chain reaction machines. Someone always designs a toilet flushing machine. I show the kids a few YouTube videos to help them come up with more wacky ideas. We watch "The Way Things Go: A Chain Reaction by Fischli and Weiss" and OK Go's music video for their song "This Too Shall Pass." I wanted to include an example of a Rube Goldberg cartoon in this post, but his images are highly trademarked. Check out www.rubegoldberg.com to see some of his hilarious cartoons.
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