Could you knock down a building using only dominoes?

This week we continued our study of energy by exploring how energy is stored and transferred in various situations involving "chain reactions" (also known as Rube Goldberg devices). These are things like falling dominoes, warehouse shelves being toppled over, and most fun of all, machines that are deliberately complex in order to amuse us.

Your child may have already told you about how we will be building our own chain reaction machine in class. Students have been encouraged to think about things that might make a good component of our machine. Kavi and Arabel each have even worked on something at home that we'll be adding to our machine next week. You can help your child brainstorm ideas and locate items around the house that may be useful to our machine. You can also search for videos online of chain reaction machines (also called Rube Goldberg Machines) to help come up with some ideas.