Creating Art that Moves

3rd Graders learned about the Kinetic Artist, Rube Goldberg in STEAM.  A Kinetic Artist makes art that moves.  During this unit students learned about simple machines and were challenged to create 3 simple machines out of recyclable materials.  The goal was to get these simple machines to work together to make a more complex machine.  A Rube Goldberg machine performs a simple task in a complex manner.  For example, students created a device that turned off the lights or turned on a computer.  The students were supposed to create chain reactions and we tied in our reading skill of “Cause and Effect” into our projects.  We followed the Engineering & Design Process (Ask, Imagine, Plan, Create and Improve)  and documented our progress in our notebooks. Here is a video summary of our Rube Goldberg unit: