My favorite board game growing up was Mouse Trap. I actually
don’t remember the rules very much, because we rarely played by them. I suppose
it was similar to many other games: roll the dice, move your mouse piece…steal
some cheese. The exciting part was setting off the mousetrap for an unlucky
player. It was a complex chain reaction, started by turning a crank, setting
multiple pieces in motion, finally resulting in a trap falling down on one of
the game pieces. I didn’t know it then, but it was an example of a Rube
Goldberg Device.
Rube Goldberg was an engineer turned cartoonist, who drew
illustrations of complex machines that perform a simple task, such as turning a
page, or waking someone up in the morning. Strangely enough, he never actually
built any of them, but his art inspired many tinkerers to make their own
complex chain reactions.
My grandfather volunteer-taught some high school science
classes, and I know he loved Rube Goldberg devices and the math and physics
involved in them. Now that the Maker Movement has led me to finally discover an
interest in these kinds of things, I wish he were still around to collaborate
with.
I’ve learned a few simple chain reactions from a blogger,
who in turn, learned them from Make Magazine. You can learn how to make them in
this post by Frugal Fun for Boys and Girls. I introduced both the herringbone
chain reaction and the “clever levers” to a few different groups recently.
We tried the explosive clever levers on the final day of the
final book of an advanced English course with teenagers. It came in-between
some peer revision of essays, a bit of review, and a Thanksgiving feast of
cookies and pão de queijo. No one had ever made anything like this before, and
even I had just learned to make the reaction the class period before.
We discovered that it was easier to work in pairs, one
person holding the tongue depressors and Jenga blocks as the other wrapped the
rubber band around them. At first, I had to give students a lot of guidance
with assembling and connecting the cells, because it was a bit confusing. But
pretty soon, they were teaching each other, and the structure grew. I had
rarely seen this group of students so engaged. After we set off a delightfully
fun explosion, I told everyone that their English studies had brought them to
this point, that the structures and vocabulary and skills they had learned were
now theirs to use however they wanted, to communicate, collaborate, and solve
any number of problems.
My next class that day was a conversation class, and I
decided to introduce the herringbone reaction as an icebreaker, with the extra
challenge to expand the chain reaction using other pieces. This group was a
lower level, and had limited vocabulary to interact and problem-solve, but with
some guidance, they were able to get underway, working on the challenge together. Eventually, the group started
making decisions independently, assigning tasks, trying to expand the reaction,
planning each part, adapting as necessary.
However, when we tried to set off the reaction, it didn’t go
as expected.
It actually didn’t really go.
Is that a problem? Absolutely not. I strongly believe that
when incorporating the Maker Movement into classes that we need to make sure
students have a safe place to fail. Not only that, but we also need to help
them learn from failures. My knowledge of physics is minimal, but even so, it
wasn’t up to me to explain everything, but rather, to help students figure
things out on their own.
My objective for that particular class, however, took us in
a completely different direction. Using Thanksgiving Day as a transition, we
started discussing rights and freedoms that we are thankful for. I adapted a lesson plan from the Smithsonian Institution about objects that represent
certain freedoms, and connected it to the 16 Days of Activism Against
Gender-Based Violence campaign that our bi-national center is participating in.
The students were more ready to dive into this topic than I thought they would
be, and, once they were provided with some vocabulary, the conversation got
deep.
We were talking about how making change in society is a slow
process when I saw the connection to the chain reaction. We had all worked for
a while to set up these pieces, with an expectation of how things would go, but
there were setbacks. Even when we thought we had solved part of the problem and
gotten further, things still didn’t fully go as planned. We needed extra
support at certain points down the line. But isn’t that a metaphor for
progress? Sometimes we think everything is in place and we’re finally getting
somewhere, only to realize we’re still stuck. Sometimes we need that extra
push at the right moment somewhere down the line. And other
times, we need to set things up again patiently, test, and keep making those
minor adjustments until we get it right.
I’ll definitely bring these and other chain reactions to
English classes, to get students to describe a process, to reflect using
vocabulary for challenges and achieving goals, to use simple past and any
number of grammar structures. But more important than that is the community
aspect of building and solving problems together, something we do through
English language. There will be setbacks and frustrations, and the dominoes
will fall when we don’t want them to, but we are learning what we are capable
of, and realizing that every person can be part of something big, just like the
marble that gets something going.
How would you add to this final chain reaction? I wanted
something to fall and then explode, like mouse traps and ping-pong balls. Any
ideas? Let’s think about the role we play in our communities. How can your
unique connections lead to something big, even if it’s one block at a time,
with setbacks and frustrations?
I’ll be writing about the 16 Days campaign in next week’s
post, and taking a break from Maker Monday posts until school starts again in
February. Meanwhile, follow me on Instagram @danitissima, and let’s exchange
ideas!
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