Maria Montessori Meets Rube Goldberg

Norwalk Middle School Wins MIT Design Contest

By creating a machine that, in only 26 steps, blew a bubble, the team from the Montessori Middle School of Norwalk, CT, won the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s annual Rube Goldberg Machine Design Contest April 12 in Stamford, CT.

The contest, sponsored by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and General Electric, challenges middle schoolers to create a device in the tradition of the high-complexity, low-result designs of cartoonist Rube Goldberg.

Competing against 23 teams from New York and New England, the team from the four-year-old middle school scored 191 out of 200 possible points, a 12-point margin over the second-place team.

“The kids were quintessential Montessorians,” said Ramani DeAlwis, the school’s director, who watched the three-hour competition from a gymnasium balcony. “They worked together, gave and took from each other, did a lot of sharing—real collaboration. And in true Montessori fashion, they had 10 minutes left at the end and cleaned up their space.”

It was the first time in the competition for the team from the Montessori Middle School. The teams selected to complete are given a set of materials—for example, pipe cleaners, mouse traps, marbles, pieces of wood—with which to build a machine. DeAlwis said the team received materials for the contest in January and held three or four practices weekly to prepare. By rule, the machine must require at least five steps to complete the assigned task.

Six of the schools’ 35 student were members of the team: Kathleen Kranzlin, Tom Kitt, Kyle Mathews, Gavin Nelson, Kate Nelson and Samantha Tesluk.

Linda Krulwich served as faculty advisor.

“While the Rube trophy is certainly a point of great pride for our school,” wrote Mary Zeman, who founded the school as an extension of her elementary program, “it only validates the power of Montessori’s earliest ‘machines’ and where they lead. From the Pink Tower to the button frame to elemental tools of sensorial and practical life, to simple elements for research then to complex materials for language, math, music, art and science. As the years go by, Montessori’s insistence on interactive participation becomes an internal phenomenon that takes hold and makes every difference in a life.

?It all connects and so do we.”