Building a better mousetrap

Students at Bonita High in Ontario are participating in the Rube Goldberg project, tying in pieces of comics and popular culture along the way.

Rube Goldberg was a cartoonist famous for his "Rube Goldberg machines" — devices that are exceedingly complex and perform very simple tasks in a very indirect and convoluted way, such as washing windows:



The Bonita High students were tasked with creating a Goldberg machine using comic characters to tell their story:

Once each year, students in Bonita's Accelerated Freshmen Core program channel the spirit of cartoonist Rube Goldberg, known for designing fantastically complex devices that perform basic tasks.

Goldberg's absurd and convoluted influence lives on in today's pop culture, such as in the machines that launch jam onto toast for Wallace and Gromit.

For several weeks, the freshmen were tasked with constructing a story about superheroes, then building a full room's worth of simple machinery to act it out.

This year, 18 groups of students each built a section of their machine, giving life to their superhero as part of the overall contraption.

"It's a machine that tells a story," said Madison Zagurski, 15.

After saving the day, the man of steel was knocked from the sky by the Kryptonite-infused meteor and dropped into the lair of the treacherous and licentious Poison Ivy.



Read the article for more information and to see more pictures, and check out the Rube Goldberg site or Wikipedia for more info on the cartoonist.