SJHS News

Robin Anderson
SJHS Staff Writer

These next two weeks will be very busy for some eighth grade students at SJHS. The students in Mr. Kindrick’s and Mrs. Carpenter’s classes will be building mousetrap cars and Rube Goldberg machines. They started building these machines on March 27th, and they will be due on April 10th.

“The students will have to create a car that will only be propelled on the stored elastic potential energy of the spring in the mouse trap,” said Mr. Kindrick. The students are building these machines out of the simple machines they are currently studying. They have learned about the transfer of different types of energy and the simple machines that give a machine an advantage for work to be done.

The students have another option besides the mousetrap car. They can instead build a Rube Goldberg machine, which is a machine that performs a series of complex events, usually in a chain reaction, to achieve a very simple task, such as turning off a light switch, or pouring a glass of water. The Rube Goldberg machine was most noted by a man named Rube Goldberg, who was an American cartoonist and inventor in the early twentieth century.

The students in this class think they will have lots of fun doing this project. “I think it’ll be fun building stuff,” said Aleks Newman, an eighth grade student in Mr. Kindrick’s class.

Even students in ninth grade look back on the project with fond memories. “I grew attached to my beautiful mousetrap car. The lever broke the day of the race, and I was forced to duct tape a pencil to it to act as the lever,” said KresLynn Knouse, a ninth grade student at SJHS, “I don’t even remember how far it went, but I wish I could do it again.” We all wish the eighth graders good luck on their project and hope they do well.