Physics Honors Rube Goldberg: http://youtu.be/WYHJP3p-PNo

End-of-year STEM projects are finally completed, science fairs judged, grades turned in, and students tested and (like these students, long) graduated. 

Yet. 

In YouTube-landia the lessons learned continue.

These students have one of the most-viewed Rube Goldberg Machine projects online. For a variety of reasons I can see why:  they demonstrate how frustrating science and engineering can be. Failure after failure after failure.

Disclosure, I know these guys:  one missed his own birthday dinner (the family car disappears mysteriously in the filming:  they went out without him!); another loves science but hated the “epic FAIL” feeling when just one variable was over-manipulated; and still another just wanted it to end. But all of them went on to major in STEM fields in college, all of them went on to graduate from those colleges, and–well–all of them learned to keep going on.

The minor, but real, human drama of it:   the victory, the sheer exuberance of *not* failing that one time, that one experimental run is… real. 

Science is like that: fail, fail, fail, fail, fail, fail, fail, fail, fail, fail, fail…SUCCESS!!!!!!

STEM isn’t that far from life that way.