Fandom High School

"Welcome back, class," Amaya greeted the students with a nod as usual and a faint grin that indicated she was particularly excited about today's lesson. "Hope you're all feeling better after the weekend, but I suppose we're all pretty used to it by now, and it's time to move on, and the best way to do that is with some good hard work."

And it would seem that Amaya had been putting in quite a bit of hard work herself, as thee were a few intriguing contraptions and machines in the shop that were definitely not the usual pieces of equipment they were used to running.

"Not so much hard work with our hands today, though, but rather with our heads. We're coming up on the end of the semester, so the next few weeks will be building up to your final projects. Remember last week, we worked on simple machines? Those are going to be a key element, more than likely, as we set you off on making your contraption. The rules are pretty simple: I want you to take some time and think about a simple task. Could be switching on a light. Tying your boots. Toasting your bread. Something really mundane and basic...and then I want you to try to think up a machine with at least five moving parts to perform that task.

"There's actually a term for this sort of thing on this world," and didn't Amaya just sound just pleased as hell about that, like that was the most amazing thing ever? "They call it a Rube Goldberg machine, a device intentionally designed to perform a simple task in an overly complicated and complex manner. Named after a cartoonist who was known to feature these kinds of machines in his work.

"Now, I've gone ahead and tried to recreate some of his devices from my research," because of course you would, Amaya, "as well as a few others to help inspire you guys. Take some time to look them over, see what they do, and maybe bounce some ideas around for simple tasks that could use a complex solution. It's mostly brainstorming today, maybe get a little work in if you have an idea and want to see how it works. You guys can use the week before next class to start thinking on some ideas, and next class, we'll start mapping things out and building, and then you'll have all that last week to put things together to show off your machine as your final, so there's plenty of time to really come up with something great."

Barring, of course, nothing the island threw at them got in the way.