museum news
Houston museum's new exhibit brings Rube Goldberg machines to life
The wackiness quotient is proportional to the educational quotient at the Children's Museum.
The fastest path is directly between two points, but where's the fun in that? Children's Museum Houston will be teaching kids all about physics using the outlandish and absurd techniques of Rube Goldberg called The World of Hilarious Invention.
Goldberg, an American cartoonist, engineer, and sculptor, became famous in the first half of the 1900s for his pictures of overly complicated machines designed to do simple, everyday tasks. When Wile E. Coyote or Dr. Emmett Brown would construct strange, almost artistic devices, they were mimicking Goldberg. His name has become synonymous with whimsical machinery for machinery's sake. Today, his legacy lives on through thousands of Tik Toks and YouTubes, as well as exhibitions like this.
“Rube Goldberg showed us that problem-solving doesn’t have to be practical — it can be playful, too,” said Jacob Breier, director of exhibit development at Children’s Museum Houston. “This exhibit is all about laughing at the unexpected, celebrating imagination, and letting kids see that mistakes can turn into masterpieces.”
World of Hilarious Invention opens September 27 at the Children Museum Houston (1500 Binz). Initially created by the Children’s Museum of Pittsburgh in partnership with the heirs of Rube Goldberg, the exhibit is a combination of three-dimensional models of Goldberg's cartoons mixed with interactive activities that capture the spirit of Goldberg.
Children will be able to make complicated ramp-and-ball constructions, create music (or at least melodic noise) with levers and pulleys thanks to the Music Machine, doodle their own inventions, or take a photo with a real-life version of Goldberg's famous Self-Operating Napkin.
As they delight in then cartoonish mechanisms, children will also learn the importance of experimentation, testing, and failure in complex environments. Just as there are many ways to innovate in systems, so are there many ways things can go wrong. Rather than dwelling on failure as a loss, the Rube Goldberg framework shows how failure can be funny as well as the road to greater understanding. Just because something is STEM doesn't mean it can't be wonderfully ridiculous.
The World of Hilarious Invention runs through January 11 and is included in general museum admission.
