Inspiring Creativity and Innovation: Preserving Rube Goldberg's Legacy with Jennifer George

Ever wondered how a whimsical cartoonist could inspire the future of STEM education? Dive into the fascinating world of Rube Goldberg with Jennifer George, where creativity meets innovation and imagination knows no bounds.

Jennifer George, Chief Creative Officer of the Rube Goldberg Institute and granddaughter of the legendary cartoonist, takes us on her journey to preserve and promote Rube Goldberg's legacy. Discover how the institute is revolutionizing STEM and STEAM education, encouraging young minds to think outside the box. Witness the power of hands-on, project-based learning to make a difference in how we view the world. And just in time for the holidays, there's a brand new book out this week: Rube Goldberg's Big Book of Building: Make 25 Machines That Really Work!

0:00: Celebrating Rube Goldberg's Creativity and STEM

11:49: Inspiring Creativity Through Rube Goldberg Explore the world of Rube Goldberg-inspired picture books and educational tools, as well as the power of creative, hands-on STEM learning. 

20:30: Exploring Creativity With the STEAMspirational JENNIFER GEORGE Jennifer discusses her transition from fashion and jewelry design to promoting her grandfather's legacy, focusing on the synergy between creativity and education.

28:04: How YOU Can Show Off Your Creativity With Rube Goldberg

38:31: Inspiring Hope Through Creativity

Links and Websites

• WEBSITE - rubegoldberg.org 
• Purchase Rube Goldberg's Big Book of Building: Make 25 Machines That Really Work! 
• CONTESTS - build live, digitally (Minecraft and Unreal Engine), or design (Playground and Cartoon Contests)
• iREADS - iReads Library Activity Guide for 2025 (lesson plans included)
• LEGENDS OF LEARNING - Rube-inspired Math games for elementary
• OK Go Rube Goldberg Video
• 2022 RGMC automatic book opener
• Follow on Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube.

Transcript

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00:02 - Dr Diane Jackson Schnoor (Host)
So we live in a Rube Goldberg world. We live in a world where one thing can serendipitously lead to another in magical and unexpected ways, and today I am so excited to introduce our guest. We have Jennifer George, who is the CCO of the Rube Goldberg Institute, and CCO in this case means Chief Creative Officer. Not only is she the Chief Creative Officer, she's also the DNA of the Institute, because she happens to be Rube Goldberg's granddaughter. Jennifer, welcome to the show. 

00:37 - Jennifer George (Guest)
Thank you. Thank you so much, Diane. 

00:40 - Dr Diane Jackson Schnoor (Host)
So I am so happy to have you with us. I discovered Rube Goldberg when I was working at a children's museum. We happened to have this incredible contraption in the front lobby that was inspired by his work, and I would watch these children. Literally, you couldn't get them out of the front lobby and we had three floors of fun and they just wanted to turn the buttons and see how things move from one place to another. 

01:06 - Jennifer George (Guest)
Can I ask? 

01:07 - Dr Diane Jackson Schnoor (Host)
which museum this was Shenandoah Valley Children's Museum, Discovery Museum. 

01:13 - Jennifer George (Guest)
It's a great museum. 

01:14 - Dr Diane Jackson Schnoor (Host)
And yeah, it was amazing, you couldn't get them out of the lobby because they were so fascinated by this. So I have to ask where did the impetus for your institute come from, and why celebrate Rube Goldberg? 

01:30 - Jennifer George (Guest)
Oh boy, that's a big. That's a big question with a probably too long an answer, but I'll try and make it brief. So Rube was my grandfather and I grew up. His cartoons were all around and hanging on the walls, sort of shoved in corners, blah, blah, blah. And after he died my father started in 1988 an organization to sort of kind of capture all of the good stuff that was going on around the IP, which was mostly the Rube Goldberg Machine Contest. 

02:07
And the family got involved and they started, you know, helping, you know create the annual task, because a Rube Goldberg Machine Contest every year has one task that every machine in the competition has to complete. So over the years we've had everything from recycle a can to pour a bowl of cereal, to zip a zipper, and it was mostly a college level competition. In fact it was only a college level competition. But you know, there's this acronym that sort of appeared on the horizon, called STEM, followed by STEAM, and for those of you on this podcast, I think you probably all know what it is, but it's science, technology, engineering and math. And then when you add the A in, it becomes STEAM. It includes art, and so Rube was doing STEM before that acronym ever existed. 

03:06 - Dr Diane Jackson Schnoor (Host)
Absolutely. 

03:07 - Jennifer George (Guest)
And anyway, when my father took over and created this, he you know from 1988 till he died in 2007, he and some family members were sort of like playing with what to do with this. There were obviously inquiries to license his original cartoon work. For those of you also who don't know who Rube Goldberg was, he was a cartoonist In his lifetime. He became an adjective. He became an adjective because his cartoons the ones that became so popular they were of these crazy contraptions that accomplished a very simple task in the most overly complicated and absurd way possible. So when you hear someone say, oh, it's a Rube Goldberg, it's sort of like a huge waste of time to accomplish something simple. So in these competitions we were, you know, as a family, looking for machines and kids who were really kind of hearing that calling and doing these crazy contraptions that obviously accomplished the annual task. So when my dad died, it all fell into my lap. None of my cousins wanted to deal with it. I, to be frank, I didn't really want to either. I always say that I was. 

04:32
I was grandfathered into this situation. I was originally a fashion designer. That's my you know métier for my lifetime, until STEM and Rube kind of landed on my doorstep. So I spent about seven years creating the Art of Rube Goldberg book and it may seem sort of silly, but I would travel to the competitions just to see what was going on. And I was working on this book that my father had agreed to do but that I became the heir apparent to complete, and I realized I need to educate myself. I need to figure out who was my grandfather other than Papa Rube, whose cartoons were all over our apartment. So I started going to the competitions and mostly that meant I was going to Purdue University, where the competition started we can get back to that later but and I went to where the archive is, which is at U Cal Berkeley, where they have thousands of my grandfather's cartoons. That was my grandfather's alma mater. 

05:40
And I spent, god, a week and a half really culling through the collection and at the end of the day, I started dreaming of the possibilities and what I could imagine for Rube Goldberg in the digital age. And it was also at a time when it was the dawn of YouTube. And suddenly, you know, ok go had a video that was that became more than it was like, more than viral. The fact that even today it's up to 75 million views, wow. And we and if you want to see it, go to YouTube, type in OK Go, rube Goldberg, you will find it. I will drop a link in the show notes. 

06:30
You can also go to our website and see a whole bunch of viral Rube Goldberg machines from advertisements like for Honda, kog or Beneful to kid. Builders who build these extraordinary machines, midbuilders who build these extraordinary machines, audrey Clemens, who, god, he must be in college now, but when he was little he built a monster traffic machine and it too has millions of views. And then you can. You know they've always been sort of scattered into pop culture through movies. 

07:01 - Dr Diane Jackson Schnoor (Host)
Right. 

07:02 - Jennifer George (Guest)
You know, you've got Pee Wee Herman's. You know, Big Adventure, You've got Chitty. 

07:06
Chitty Bang Bang. Chitty Bang Bang, you've also got. I was last night. I was watching Back to the Future, the whole opening and apparently Rube's name was throughout. You know, in every development meeting for that movie they were talking about Rube. 

07:23
So the it's kind of everywhere. But how do we harness this to teach kids? And you know, stem sometimes can be dry, it can be. You know, stuff you learn behind a desk. Now, granted, you've got robotics and you get the opportunity to build a robot. You've got robotics and you get the opportunity to build a robot. How cool is that? And get sort of into the automated world of coding, which is so much about what the future holds. 

08:16
No-transcript. I often, you know, I say I'm sure there are Rube Goldberg machines happening in here. Connections be connections. Do I know how it works? No, but I'm hysterical when my phone stops working. 

08:29
So I think getting it's such a nostalgic thing to see how something right in front of your eyes actually works. And then if we can get the kids to engage and laugh and maybe their parents are laughing with them and maybe you're connecting kids that never would have found each other otherwise, you know the kid that's on the spectrum, the kid that's, you know, the jock, the kid, that's the artist. I mean, how are we connecting them in a social environment so that we can inspire teamwork and collaboration and improvisation when things fail? And to me, I see all of that in the work we do in STEM and art education. 

09:19
And then the last piece of this is well not the last, because there are many things we can talk about. Last piece of this is well, not the last, because there are many things we can talk about. But the last piece is how do we level the playing field here? Because if you want to get a kid into robotics, if you don't have 10 grand in your coffers and mentors who can supply even more help, you can be brilliant and the kid can be left on the sidelines. In our competitions. We and I always say we are sort of I don't like to use this analogy, but I do say it we're like the gateway drug into all the other opportunities in STEM. 

10:03
You know opportunities in STEM, you know. All you need is a pile of junk and a great imagination and you can literally win top honors at our competitions. So it doesn't cost much of anything Dumpster dive, raid the basement, raid the attic, use everyday objects to create the transfers of energy needed, wrap a narrative into it, Get into costume. You've got two minutes to tell us the story of your machine. The story of your machine is not the story of you, necessarily. It is the story that you have created to tell the tale of why your machine or how your machine is putting toothpaste on a toothbrush. Or, in this case, your machine or how your machine is putting toothpaste on a toothbrush. Or, in this case, this year's competition last year was put toothpaste on a toothbrush. This year it's feed a pet. 

10:53 - Dr Diane Jackson Schnoor (Host)
So Saw that and the deadline is coming up right. The deadline's in February, Is that right? 

11:01 - Jennifer George (Guest)
The deadlines, you know. It's all on our website. I don't commit any of it to memory. We have deadlines that come up in all of our different competition excuse me, competitions but we can talk about that when we sort of delineate how to get involved. But we it's basically in March when the deadlines are, so there's plenty of time to put a team together. 

11:21 - Dr Diane Jackson Schnoor (Host)
You know, grab your friends, talk to your teachers and see if you know they want to help and I think that that's going to be such an important thing for any educators and family members listening. So you're going to want to go to the show notes because there's going to be links to the website, links to the competitions, links to all the videos. So don't worry about all of that, you have it right here at your fingertips. I want to circle back to something you said, jennifer, that really resonates with me, because I've spent so much of my career working with STEM and STEAM when we didn't even know that's what it was. 

11:56
I always viewed it as building connections and getting kids intrigued, and one of the things that I think the Rube Goldberg competitions and the things that you do at the Institute really help do is you're focused on those important skills that we need to be shifting to an education, because they're what drives the future critical thinking, creative problem solving, and not relying on AI or computers or technology to do it, but really relying on human ingenuity. And I'm wondering, based on all of that, do you have examples of entries or things that you've seen kids do that sort of? I guess live up to that, that show the essence? Oh my. 

12:46 - Jennifer George (Guest)
God there's. I mean literally every year, and I remember I took over Rube in. I mean it's if it was 2007,. That's a long time ago. And I will say, since then we have competitions from elementary school straight through college. So you know, you can find your division and the rules obviously change according to the age of the kid. But when you talk about, you know examples. So here's one example and there are many that I can cite, but and one. 

13:22
There was a team from St Louis Washington University, one of the early competitions. It was a college level competition and it was a team that was a bunch of girls and I think it was all girls, and they left a third of their machine on the side of the road when they drove away. And so there they are, they arrive at nationals, which you know are the finals, and they are missing a good chunk of their machine. So they worked all night, all day, and they had to be ready by 10 am the next morning. I think they got there in the afternoon the day before and they had to be ready by 10 am the next morning. I think they got there in the afternoon the day before. They not only recreated the back end of their machine that they left. But they won. Wow, and I say won. I think they won first place that year. 

14:21
So that is in industry, like, how did they do that? So where there's a will, there's a way we have seen in the past, and now there are ways not just to compete live but to film your machine and send it in. So we have an online competition as well as the live regionals that feed into the live world championships at this point, because we've got entries from pretty much all around the world. When you go onto the website you can see the laurels where we're represented internationally. So there was one of the online submissions, I think a couple years ago. 

15:02
The task for that year was open a book and there were two teachers they're in Pennsylvania, two teachers. They both taught STEM and science and their schools were like a mile apart, smaller schools and they were. It was sort of just a country road that connected them where you get from one to the other and they started the machine in one classroom and they I don't know at the end of that machine, a ball tipped into this boy's hat and he was on a bicycle and he drove the bicycle to the other classroom tipped his head and the ball fell out of his hat and it completed the machine in that classroom. 

15:53 - Dr Diane Jackson Schnoor (Host)
How amazing, what a cool sense of collaboration. 

15:57 - Jennifer George (Guest)
I know it was incredible and you know the period where he was bicycling they sped up so it was very fast and, you know, very kinetic and it was one of the best machines we've ever set. I mean, everyone on the team at Rube was just gobsmacked. And then we have, you know, we have a bunch of judges that help us with these decisions, from all walks of you know life, but they're all sort of central to the, to the Rubiverse, as I like to call it. I love it, whether it's publishers, actors, directors, ad agency people, teachers, we get a whole pool of folks to judge and all of them were just that's it. How do you say no to that? Rasheed were just that's it. How do you, how do you say no to that machine? 

16:47 - Dr Diane Jackson Schnoor (Host)
Oh, that's incredible. You know, and that's you're. You're getting to that amazing creativity when you think about what went into coming up with that idea. How many times did they have to fail before they succeeded? You know, we don't necessarily see all the failures, but we need to learn to fail forward and this is such a low stakes way to learn those skills and to learn that resilience that we need. 

17:13 - Jennifer George (Guest)
I love this. Well, the funny thing is, you know, if you look at the OK Go video again 75 million views and counting it took it wasn't until their 87th try that they actually did a complete run without you know something going wrong at one of the steps. So and I'm sure this is true for you I mean, if you're always winning and always successful, where do you learn you know you need to if you don't have failures along the way, how do you improve, how do you get better? And root-governing machines? There's a lot of failures before there's a success. 

17:55
So it's perseverance and the tactile kind of project-based learning. Part of this is so important because, even though we have wonderful, amazing digital contests and I can talk about those later I think it's so important at some point because it's inevitable. Every kid wants to be in front of a screen, but sometimes you have to pry them away and say, OK, we're going to build this, and the kids are suddenly talking to each other in person. 

18:27 - Dr Diane Jackson Schnoor (Host)
It's really big, it's magical. And you've made it even easier for an educator, because I remember I did when I was doing summer camps at the Discovery Museum. One of the things we would do is we would bring out the random assorted junk and we were playing with cause and effect, we were playing with push and pull, we were playing with kinetic and potential energy, newton's three laws, and we would have them build contraptions to get a ball from one place to another. And my favorites were the ones that did not do it completely systematically. They added the spins and the wheels and they were sort of pre-Rube Goldberg inventors, but they were thinking about how do I make this cool? And you've got this series of books that have come out since I was doing that the Rube Goldberg books and as you and I were talking just now, I learned something that I think all of our educators need to learn, which is that there's curriculum that goes with them. So can you talk about the Rube Goldberg books for kids and sort of what special gifts there are waiting for us? 

19:31 - Jennifer George (Guest)
Well, the funny thing is so when? So the first book which you have behind you, thankfully on your, on your shelf up there, thank you, it's. It's a picture book. It's 15 contraptions that take little Rube, the character we created through his school day, so how he wakes up in the morning, how he gets dressed, how he makes breakfast, all the way to the end where, how he turns off the light to go back to bed. 

19:59
So, and they're done in the style of my grandfather but modernized my grandfather's cartoons, because he was trained as an engineer, but he really was an artist, but his mechanical mind, would you know, present itself on every page pretty much, and they were done in the form of patent applications. So he really took them seriously. These were real inventions and that was part of the silliness of it. So we tried to do a similar thing with these new picture books, but in addition to the picture books, there's curriculum and activity guides, lesson plans that attach to each of the two picture books that we have, you have the first one, which is Rube Goldberg's Simple, normal, humdrum School Day, which is definitely not very humdrum the way he goes about it, and then the second one is called Rube Goldberg's Simple, normal, definitely Different Day Off. 

21:00
And it's funny we were working on that book during COVID, before COVID, and it was supposed to be Rube Goldberg's sick day off. Oh, tonally, kids have had a year long sick day off. I think we better. But the book was pretty much done so we had to kind of recalibrate it. And it's funny there's one of the inventions in that book is about how to pretend to be sick so you can have a day off Anyway. 

21:34
So that was a little funny, but we have again. We have activity and lesson plan guides for each, and they're free and they're downloadable on our website. But there's also another thing that we have in our quiver of education tools is there are these paper engineer kits and they're templates. All you need is a printer and some printer paper and like a penny and a paper clip, I mean things that you would definitely have around. There's a machine to flip a coin, a machine to make a cup of tea, and there's another machine that's a snack hat, and it's a hat that administers popcorn. And you'll see, in the definitely different day off there's one invention where little Rube is at the movies and he's wearing his snack hat. So we like to think there's a through line there from the book to an actual tactile way to make the snack hat. 

22:36 - Dr Diane Jackson Schnoor (Host)
Oh, that's so fun and you were giving me an example when we were talking, before we came on, of a family that took it to an extreme for Halloween. Can you describe the video you just got? We? 

22:49 - Jennifer George (Guest)
just got this on Friday and I mean it made my day and everyone else in our at the Institute. We all were just dying over this, this, this little kid. We got an email, which we do often into the Institute with people with showing us their machines and what they're doing, and Rube and questions. 

23:11
And this one was a mother of a little boy in San Francisco and the little boy loves Rube and he decided he wanted to be Rube Goldberg for Halloween, meaning the little Rube Goldberg, and I think it must have been his mother or father. I'm sure he had a say in it, but they put him in this contraption A. He looked like the little boy, little Rube in the books, because he loves those, and he's wearing his costume. That is a box of some sort that has tubing and when people gave him candy they had to put it into the tubing and it went around and did all these things that eventually fell into his, his bucket of candy. So I don't know if we're going to be allowed to post it, but it did make us very, very happy. 

24:07 - Dr Diane Jackson Schnoor (Host)
I love that creativity. So I want to get into the digital assets in a minute and sort of really focus in on the competitions. But before we do that, one of the things I like to do is to get to know the people on our show, and you, jennifer, have such a cool adventure in learning to share on your own. 

24:29
Jennifer, have such a cool adventure in learning to share on your own, so I know that you sort of got rubed into doing all of this, but before that you know, describe your adventures in learning, because you had a whole world and a whole career that kind of led you into this world. Can you tell us? 

24:42 - Jennifer George (Guest)
about you In happenstance. Okay, so where do I begin? I was, I was a fashion designer. That was my trade. I also did jewelry. I you know some people. The label was called Jennifer George. 

25:01
You can go to like vintage shows now and you can actually find them. Or if you want to see what I do now in the way of, you know, clothing and jewelry, and mostly it's really scarves and the jewelry I do and I sort of kind of tangentially like my grandfather and how he saw the world, I will take the elements of your jewelry box the lost earring, your grandfather's cufflinks, the beads of your mother's and people send me all the stuff that's sentimental, that they're definitely not wearing, and I make mostly necklaces out of them. So they're really composite pieces out of, I want to say, everyday objects not dissimilar to my grandfather. They're not meant to be particularly humorous, they're meant to be beautiful. 

25:53
I did one, which was really fun, for the only female founding member of Burning man, because they give tokens to the people that are involved in Burning man and so I have like 20 years of these talismans to manage. Um, it's much more a costume piece than a wearable piece. I am because it's huge, it's like a breastplate and I had to balance it with chains in the back, uh, but it ended up being in the Burning man exhibit that was at the Smithsonian. 

26:27
Oh cool and that so I and my grandfather. The last exhibit in his lifetime was at the Smithsonian, so it did feel very much like, oh, there is this funny connection between us other than what's obvious. And in my sort of fashion career I did clothing for incredible women of all shapes and sizes Oprah Winfrey had some of my stuff. 

26:58
Bonnie Raitt wore my stuff and I had the honor to create the inaugural attire for Tipper Gore in the last election and that it's my understanding that that her sort of opera coat, which I loved, and the dresser in the Smithsonian, and the interior of the opera coat had embroidery with all of the states in the United States embroidered. It was black lining. They were embroidered in red with gold stars in between and personal stuff to her and Al. So it was really a wonderful, wonderful thing to do. 

27:41 - Dr Diane Jackson Schnoor (Host)
Oh, that is beautiful, and I love the fact that you've brought sort of that creative energy and that creative thought process into what you're doing now. I mean, it's very clear in the way that the Institute is set up that there's this pulse of creativity and art in everything that you all are doing, and now I sort of have a better sense of where that comes from. Also, just kind of on a personal note, what do you remember about your grandfather? How old were you when he passed? You know, what kind of relationship did you have with him? 

28:13 - Jennifer George (Guest)
Well, there were six grandchildren and I was the second youngest. I have very vivid memories of him because my parents went out a lot and would leave me with my grandparents, and you know I talk about this in the essay. And there's there's the big grown up book which is called the Art of Rube Goldberg. That's the one that I talked about at the beginning. It took seven years to have homework to put together and there's an essay about. 

28:47
You know my memories of my grandfather and he, you know he taught me how to draw, which is something I used in my career a lot. He taught me how to shake hands and whenever I do a Zoom in a classroom with little kids even bigger kids I'll say, okay, I want you to introduce. I say, if you remember nothing else about Rube Goldberg, remember this. And I teach them how to shake hands properly, because I think it actually means something. And he taught me. He said, you know, have a firm, hard hands, look someone in the eye and and let them know that they're meeting someone, because that first you never have a second chance to make a first impression, right, right, and all the kids start shaking hands and say they're all. It's very fun, but that was something very important to my grandfather. 

29:42
And the other thing and I'm going to again important to my grandfather, and the other thing and I'm going to again make this short he taught me how to make paper balloons and which I just loved. We would sit there and make paper balloons for an entire afternoon. He tried to teach me croquet, which I was not very good at, and he liked to be the center of attention. I mean, I think he'd be very happy that he was still in the lexicon and that he was kind of, in a weird way, more relevant today than when he died. He's gone from being an adjective to a verb, and now the question is do? 

30:26
you rube and the answer very often in classrooms all across the country today, the answer is yes. 

30:35 - Dr Diane Jackson Schnoor (Host)
Oh, I love that. So let's transition from do you rube? To how do we Rube? 

30:42 - Jennifer George (Guest)
Very good question. So there are many ways to Rube and all of it is on our website, which is RubeGulbertorg, and we actually just lost. We had RubeGulbertcom and I'm going to commiserate with anyone out there that this has happened to. I don't know. It was like an accident of communication. We lost RubeGulbertcom. Now some Taiwanese entity owns RubeGulbertcom. We've tried to talk to them, but they won't even return an email. So if any of you out there listening and have a solution because you have been through this before please let us know how to handle this. But anyway, we're rubegulbergorg, which makes sense, and we have a whole section on contests, and what's very cool is we don't just stick to the classic OG Rube Goldberg machine contest. This fall we have the playground challenge, which is, if you have kids that love to draw and imagine and kind of come up with crazy ways to interact with the world, this is the contest for them and it's open through December 17th, so there's still plenty of time. Please let us show us your ideas of what you think the coolest Rube Goldberg playground or component of a Rube Goldberg playground would be. 

32:12
This competition started at least the idea of it started during COVID, remember we talked about, you know, certain good things came out of COVID. So, you know, teachers and parents, everyone was faced with how do we teach kids while we're all in lockdown? And how do we bring education outside? And the idea of like, oh my God, wouldn't it be amazing to let kids become part of the machines they're studying, you know? And simple machines is obviously something that teachers you know all across the country are trying to teach kids. So that's where the idea of oh well, let's, let's design a Rube Goldberg playground, but let's start. Let's start as a competition. That's what we do. 

32:56
So Miracle Recreation, in partnership with the Institute, we came up with the challenge and there's ways in which you can enter. It's really pretty simple. It's almost like putting together a PowerPoint presentation of your ideas and then we're going to pick a couple of the winning students from each division. Again, when I say a couple, I don't know like we're going to get all the submissions. We're going to see what comes in, and are they individuals who are submitting or teams? And but from that pool there are going to be, there's going to be, at least one winner from each division and the winners are going to come to. 

33:39
And when I say each division 17 and under, 18 and over, and we expect we have professionals that are sending in, so it's not just for kids. And we're going to have a sort of design charrette at the Miracle Recreation offices so the winners can learn from the professional builders. And out of that session we're going to come up with the Rube Goldberg Playground and then we're going to have the next phase of the competition. We're going to take applications and we're going to give one of these new, brand new Rube Goldberg Playgrounds to whoever's the most compelling applicant. And again, we haven't really gone. We haven't gotten to phase two yet. And then phase three, of course, is breaking ground and building the playground. 

34:31 - Dr Diane Jackson Schnoor (Host)
That sounds amazing and what a cool way to take that idea of kid engineered all the way to fruition and to be able to show that what you do matters. 

34:43 - Jennifer George (Guest)
Absolutely, and we're going to have curriculum embedded into the playground so through barcodes you can eat, so parents, anybody can hold their phone up to a particular stanchion and learn about it, and then there will be from the playground. There's also going to be curriculum that goes back with teachers into the classroom as they study simple machines and move forward in that part of their curriculum. 

35:12 - Dr Diane Jackson Schnoor (Host)
That sounds amazing. So we're coming towards the end of our conversation and I'm wondering. There are a couple more competitions. 

35:22 - Jennifer George (Guest)
We've got the Unreal Engine competition, which is a digital animation competition, so you can build, you can animate a Rube Goldberg machine and if you have ever seen Sing, I mean, or Wallace and Gromit, there are incredible machines that are animated. So there's something called the Unreal Engine Learning Kit. It is an incredible tool and it's free to kids. We are partnering with Intel and Avid to do this. There are amazing prizes there that they're supplying which we're so excited about. So again, at rubegulberorg, you can find out all about that as well. There's a Minecraft competition for next year and again we try to meet kids and teachers and parents where kids want to live, you know, in their specialized area of interest. 

36:15
So we are not just talking to the tactile builder kids, we're talking to really pretty much everyone in a classroom. 

36:23 - Dr Diane Jackson Schnoor (Host)
And then we've got the pet competition too. 

36:25 - Jennifer George (Guest)
Well, that's the real one, that's the. When I say real, they're all real, but that's the OG, that's the Rube Goldberg Machine Contest, where, in real life, you're going to build a machine that feeds your pet. And now also, I'm going to put another wrench in that If you want to digitally animate, that's also the competition there too. So you're going to have to build a machine Like if you know, I don't know Steven Spielberg came to you and said you know, we need a machine in our next animated movie that builds a pet. You would have that same conundrum too. You'd have to figure out how to do it and make it room. 

37:03 - Dr Diane Jackson Schnoor (Host)
Oh, very cool. So I love sort of all of the different ways that this conversation has flowed and added in new ideas and so much of what you do just, I think, is powerful education. 

37:19 - Jennifer George (Guest)
I have one more thing. Yes, okay. 

37:23 - Dr Diane Jackson Schnoor (Host)
If I don't mention it. 

37:25 - Jennifer George (Guest)
Tomorrow our book comes out, which is our newest book. It's called Rube Goldberg's Big Book of Building and it is 25 contraptions that you can build at home. And it's really the manual, it is the roadmap, it's the guide to building Rube Goldberg machines. My co-writer, zach Umprovich, is our national contest director and he is the one who created all these machines. It's please, please, you will love it if you have kids that like this sort of stuff. There is simple three-step machines and then it goes all the way up to more advanced, complicated machines and it's really everyday objects that you have at home. And then our it sounds like a perfect holiday gift. It is an incredible under the tree gift and it's a really great thing to have in a classroom. I promise they'll be fighting over who gets to take the book home. 

38:22 - Dr Diane Jackson Schnoor (Host)
So this sounds like something you want to get for the teacher in your life as well. 

38:27 - Jennifer George (Guest)
Absolutely. 

38:29 - Dr Diane Jackson Schnoor (Host)
I love that. So, jennifer, before we close, I kind of want to circle back to. You've had a chance to see things all over the country, all over the world. Really, what brings you hope these days? 

38:45 - Jennifer George (Guest)
Literally going to our competitions. I know it sounds cheesy and gory, but inevitably when I get to one of our live contests and I'm wandering around and I'm seeing these kids and they're working and they're problem solving in real time and they're trying, they're getting it together and you see the immense creativity and out of the box thinking required to actually even just to get to a competition, let alone to nationals or world championships, as they're called now. It gives me hope. These are kids who are all they're called now. It gives me hope. You know, these are kids who are all getting along. They're problem solving in real time they're. It's a metaphor for how the world needs to come together, especially now. 

39:31 - Dr Diane Jackson Schnoor (Host)
Thank you so much, jennifer. We have been talking to Jennifer George, and if you want to learn more about the Rube Goldberg Institute, I'm going to drop all of the links in the show notes and go out and start inventing. Thank you for joining us today. Thank you. 

Rube Goldberg, Creativity, STEM, STEAM, Education, Contest, Innovation, Hands-on Learning, Failure, Project-based Learning, Discovery Museum, Picture Books, Fashion, Legacy, Collaboration, Playground Challenge, Miracle Recreation, Ingenuity, Global Cooperation, Invention