Remember when you were little and loved to read the backs of cereal boxes? There used to be games and puzzles and fun characters to keep you entertained while eating breakfast. Well, if you haven’t noticed, General Mills has just amped up their entire box for both entertainment and educational value, to introduce kids to basic STEM concepts in a really fun way.
On the backs of specially marked boxes of Cheerios, Lucky Charms, Cinnamon Toast Crunch and more, you’ll find blueprints to one of six Rube Goldberg-inspired machines using concepts foundational to physics like the lever, pulley, wheel and axle, screw, inclined plane and the wedge.
General Mills sent Mazzy and I all six different Rube Goldberg boxes and after a brief lesson in simple machines, I let Mazzy choose which one to do. I think she based her choice partly on which machines interested her the most and partly on which cereals she wanted to eat a bowl of while creating them. After all, what else are you going to do with the cereal once you cut up the box?
Mazzy’s first choice was making a Cinnamon Toast Crunch box into a cereal elevator using a pulley system, which worked even better than I was expecting. Her second choice was making a Cookie Crisp catapult using the lever concept. I think it’s safe to say that there were more than a few pieces of cereal on the floor when we were done playing with that one.
All in all, it was a simple way to spend an afternoon and one that both of us had a lot of fun with. And we learned something! Like, we learned that the harder you hit the catapult, the harder it is to find the cereal after it flies all the way across the room.
Watch us put our simple machines together in the video below!
If your kid creates his/her own cereal box simple machine, you can submit their creation for the chance to win a $20,000 college scholarship! For details on how to enter, visit www.Rubecerealmachines.com. NO PURCHASE NECESSARY. VOID WHERE PROHIBITED. Open only to legal residents of the 50 United States & DC, 18 years of age and older. Ends at 11:59 p.m. CT on August 1, 2018. Click for Official Rules, which govern, including odds, free method of entry and prizes descriptions.
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This post was sponsored by General Mills, but our cereal box machines were made on our own!
These project ideas out of cereal boxes are great. My daughter has been also working on her science project to build a catapult which could throw 20ft away this week. We should use cereals to see if they get into a bowl 20 ft away.
You may want to consider looking into book & project series https://www.goldieblox.com/ – may be a great business to partner up with. It’s engineering geared (ha!) towards girls.
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