Bibliographic record
Abstract
As a follow-up to our previous paper on the successes and limitations of using Rube Goldberg machines in a first year engineering design course, in this paper, we outline how we addressed some of the limitations from our first attempt to use Rube Goldberg machines in our course.As pointed out in our previous paper, the first year engineering curriculums of many engineering programs are heavily loaded with science classes and have very little exposure to engineering.Engineering schools must find ways to introduce students to engineering in a fun, engaging fashion.For the past two years, we have been using Rube Goldberg machines to help achieve this goal.Our first year design and communications course attempts to engage students by challenging them to design and build a working Rube Goldberg machine as part of a group project.By working to achieve specific design goals that are subject to constraints, students get to work on a miniengineering project that is fun, creative, and challenging.The long-term goal of the Rube Goldberg Experiment is twofold: (1) to give first year engineering students a positive engineering design experience in their very first semester and (2) to develop a culture of anticipation in Grade 12 students who might be considering an engineering education at the University of Regina.In this paper, we outline changes made to our approach that address shortcomings identified from our first semester and provide results from student feedback, which demonstrate a positive response to the project.Table 1.ENGG 123 Rube Goldberg Projects -Fall 2009 Theme 1 Indiana Jones Primary Task Rescue Indy's hat.Start Action Replace a Golden Idol with a bag of sand.Sub-Goals• Indy escapes from a giant rolling boulder.• Tribal warriors shoot five poisoned darts at Indy (a distance of 50 cm).• The Ark opens and destroys the Nazis.• Indy falls into a pit of snakes and escapes.• Kill a bad guy with a plane propeller.• Indy shoots a cocky swordsman.Theme 2Winter Olympics Primary Task Raise a Canadian flag and play the national anthem. Start ActionLight the Olympic flame.Sub-Goals• Send a bobsled down a track with at least three 90° curves.• Bury a Loonie under the arena ice.• Launch a ski jumper 100 cm.• Curl a rock to the button down the ice (a distance of 50 cm).• Shoot at least three of five biathlon targets.• Hang a gold medal around a Canadian athlete's neck.Theme 3Harry Potter Primary Task Catch the Snitch (the Snitch must fly 50 cm). Start ActionHarry dramatically escapes from the Dursleys.Sub-Goals• Steal a golden egg from a Hungarian Horntail dragon.• Crash a flying car into the Whomping Willow.• Knock out a troll with a club.• Blow up Aunt Marge.• Have an Owl drop off the post.• Ride the Hogwarts Express Theme 4Pirates of the Caribbean Primary Task Bury a treasure chest.Start Action Launch a boat.Sub-Goals• Raise a pirate flag on a boat mast.• Attack a ship with a giant squid.• Rescue Jack Sparrow from being stranded on a deserted island.• Empty at least one bottle of rum.• Fire three cannon balls a distance of 50 cm at an enemy ship.• Make a hostage walk the plank.Theme 5 Ghostbusters Primary Task Capture Slimer.Start Action Call Ghostbusters.Sub-Goals• Make three ghosts appear (can appear separately).• Drive the Ghostbusters car out of their headquarters.• Slime Venkman.• Melt the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man.• Fire a Proton Pack electron beam at Vigo the Carpathian.• Fill a 30 cm long sewer line with slime.Theme 6Natural Disasters Primary TaskRescue three survivors in a helicopter. Start ActionCrash an asteroid into Earth.Sub-Goals• Block the Trans-Canada Highway in BC with a landslide (minimum of 30 cm).• Destroy the Hollywood sign with an earthquake.• Bury the U of R campus in snow and ice during a Saskatchewan blizzard.• Have a tornado in Kansas suck up Dorothy and Toto.• Melt the ice caps so that the rising ocean floods Florida.• Blow over a famous tall building with high winds.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.018 | 0.006 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".