Eight Carroll County children were asked the question: "What do you do when you hear a strange noise in your bedroom at night and think that there may be a monster in the corner?"
Their answer - build a contraption that turns on the light without having to get out of bed. So they did.
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They dubbed the massive, wacky, machine "The Illuminator" and constructed it using items such as a baseball, easels, pipes, cones, a remote-controlled car, wood scraps, plywood, mousetraps and a bowling ball.
"It's cool to make something so complex to do something so simple," said Andrew Brusca, 14, of Westminster. "This machine illustrates how difficult some people make the easiest things to do."
Andrew was one of eight middle school students who participated in the Summer!Kids@Carroll's Convoluted Contraptions camp, one of more than 100 enrichment programs at Carroll Community College. It is one of 42 new programs offered this year.
Children learn how machines move and operate and how to make crazy cartoons out of contraptions, said Ken Mihalyov, who created the camp.
The idea for the program is loosely based on a concept created by Pulitzer Prize winning cartoonist and author Reuben Lucius Goldberg, known as Rube Goldberg, who created contraptions to poke fun at technology, Mihalyov said.
"Rube thought there were two ways to do things - simple and hard," said Mihalyov who teaches sixth grade at Westminster West Middle School. "And he thought that people always choose the hard way."
Mihalyov also created the program to test it to see if it worked as part of his science curriculum, he said.
"The kids learn a ton of different skills in this program," Mihalyov said. "They learn physics, engineering, and problem-solving skills. They also get to use tools they might not get to use at home, and they learn to be very creative."
Mihalyov started the program with a lesson about Goldberg, he said. Then the participants drew their own contraptions , said Mihalyov, who lives in Jacobus, Pa.
To create the machine, Mihalyov purchased materials at a dollar store.
"The kids had to use what I had a budget for," he said. "A lot of this stuff is just old junk I brought from home. When something didn't work, they had to adjust their plan."
The kids caught on quickly and within two days they had a machine that could turn on a light, he said.
"The entire project is their idea," he said. "I use the power tools, but they tell me what to do."
However, there wasn't anything simple about building the monstrosity, not even the planning process, said Timothy Brusca, 14, of Westminster.
"Building the machine required us to think about turning on a light in a different way," he said. "We had to think about how we could get the light switch to turn on, rather than how we turn it on."
To create the contraption, the children were divided into pairs and brainstormed ideas. Then they drew a rudimentary sketch of the contraption before starting construction.
Some of their ideas worked, and some of them were frustrating, said Andrew Brusca, 14, Timothy's brother.
For example, they wanted to create something to knock over scraps of wood that they had made to look like dominoes. First they used a rubber chicken that had an egg pop out, but that wasn't heavy enough to knock over the dominoes. So they tried something heavier to create the device - a baseball, a pot and a whoopee cushion, he said.
"We rigged the baseball to roll down a piece of gutter positioned above the pot," he said.
"When the baseball falls into the pot, it's supposed to put enough pressure on the whoopee cushion that it causes a breeze that knocks over the dominoes. That's ideal. But it didn't always work."
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Sometimes the ball would fall beside the pot, or under it, Shannon Barry said.
"The ball wouldn't fall at all, or it fell beside the pot," said Shannon, 12, of Eldersburg. "Finally we blew the whoopee cushion all the way up and positioned the ball just right. It was a lot of work, but we finally got it to work."
Once they completed the machine, it took 17 tries to get the contraption to work properly and turn on the light and then turn it off, Mihalyov said.
It was not easy. To turn on the light, the machine is triggered when the children pull and release a plunger that hits a car and sends it down a track. The car pulls a string tugging a rubber band from beneath the baseball, allowing it to roll down the gutter ramp and into the drain pipe.
The baseball stops and drops into a container squishing the whoopee cushion. Air from the whoopee cushion knocks over six wooden dominoes that trigger a mousetrap that activates the remote control car, causing it to drive forward until it crashes into a hammer.
The hammer swings into the baseball, sending it down the gutter into a ping-pong paddle. The paddle pulls down the string over the pulley raising the light switch to turn on the light.
When the machine is triggered, and everything works just right, the chain reaction to turn on the light fascinates Cameron Dull, 12, of Finksburg.
"This machine is really cool cause, like, everything happens at once," Cameron said. "You see the baseball go down into the pot, and the marble, and the bowling ball, but it all happens so fast it's hard to see more than that."
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