Sponsored by General Mills Cereal.
Breakfast isn’t just fun and nutritional anymore, it is also educational thanks to General Mills Cereal! General Mills Cereal and Rube Goldberg, Inc. are partnering to introduce specially marked boxes of Cheerios, Cinnamon Toast Crunch, Cocoa Puffs, Cookie Crisp, Lucky Charms and Reese’s Puffs so families can enjoy a S.T.E.M. (science, technology, engineering, math) education right at the breakfast table!
Do you remember who Rube Goldberg was? “He is best known for a series of popular cartoons depicting complicated gadgets that perform simple tasks in indirect, convoluted ways, giving rise to the term Rube Goldberg machines for any similar gadget or process.” He is the only person in the dictionary to also be considered an adjective!
General Mills Cereal has made it much easier for you to build individual Rube Goldberg devices at home, nothing as complicated as the above! Each cereal box builds 1 of the 6 simple machines (lever, pulley, wheel & axle, screw, inclined plane and wedge) that are foundational to physics. Instructions are on each box to show you how to bring each simple machine to life. The specially marked boxes are now available, but only for a limited time.
S.T.E.M. is something that my inventive and artistic son has always been interested in, so working with me on this post was easy for him! It is a great way to bond with children of all ages, even my freshman in high school! He made two of the S.T.E.M. projects.
The first project we did was using the task on the Cookie Crisp box to create a lever catapult machine:
Put some Cookie Crisp in the open end and catapult it into your cereal bowl!
The Cookie Crisp goes flying in the air right into the bowl! What a fun way to eat breakfast! Can you think of any devices like this that you see in your day to day life? We do not see many catapults around, but the kids playground does have a see-saw, that is a real life example of something that uses a lever (hold the catapult!).
And that was too much fun, so we did another! We followed the instructions on the Cinnamon Toast Crunch box and made a Pulley Elevator!
In this case, the cereal is raised through the moving box, moved by a pulley system. You then have the box above the cereal bowl so you can add more cereal to your breakfast!
In my neighborhood we have an example of a pulley, it is the flag pole a few buildings away from my house. The flag is hoisted to the top of the pole through a pulley!
We had a fun time making these machines together, I work double time looking for ways to bond with my teenager. In fact, he reminded me that in sixth grade, in his science class, he had written and then sung a song for the whole class and that song was about simple machines titled “Whatever the Lever!”
I think you are going to want to make them all! And there is more!
General Mills Cereal has provided you with a terrific mini S.T.E.M. activity to create with your kid, and now you can use this creation to enter an incredible sweepstakes! All you have to do to enter is submit your cereal box creations in two easy steps for a chance to win one of twenty $20,000 college scholarship, which can be used for the winner’s own college education or given to an individual of their choosing!
Entering Is Easy:
-Post a photo/video of your inventor’s General Mills Cereal box machine on Instagram or the General Mills Cereal Facebook page using #BreakfastBlueprint and #BigGSweepstakes
-Complete your entry at www.RubeCerealMachines.com.
Disclosure: I partnered with General Mills Cereal to share the new Rube Goldberg simple machine cereal boxes.
• The contest runs from 01/01/2018 to 08/01/2018.
• 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. This promotion is in no way sponsored, endorsed or administered by, or associated with Facebook or Instagram. Entrants understand that they are providing information to Sponsor and not to Facebook or Instagram. For more information about General Mills Big G Cereals or participating cereals, visit www.RubeCerealMachines.com or find us on Facebook at @GeneralMillsCereal or Instagram at @GeneralMillsCereal.
That’s really cool. I think it’s so important to instill a love of learning and exploration in our children. I love that General Mills is helping parents to do that!
Rube Goldberg is a big thing at my daughter’s school so I applaud your son and General Mills for promoting this activity. And it’s fun to watch!!
I just love rube goldberg machines! I never thought to make one using General Mills cereal. That’s pretty clever and so much fun. Going to give this idea a try with my son, see what we can accomplish 🙂
How fun is this, and I love that General Mills provided this with the cereal. My kids used to love Cookie Crisp!
You all are so fun! And this is such a cool thing to share – in terms of creativity and repurposing. Also, I so want that cereal!
What a great concept for STEM fans, and quite delicious too! I just know my daughter will want to pick up a few boxes and have some fun during breakfast.
Love how creative your son is! I would never have thought of something like that!
Now THIS is super cool! My boy would like breakfast time a lot more if it meant building one of these was involved!
My daughter got Mouse Trap for Christmas, and it totally hooked her on building. She’s going to freak when I show her to build them out of her favorite cereal boxes!
Thanks for sharing this. It does look like so much fun building these machines from cereal boxes! My kids are a little too old for this kind of activity but I will make sure my niece gets to see this post. Oh, she’ll love it.
This is cute. My kids love building rube goldbergs. I always enjoyed it too. I love how creative one can get trying to plan and execute them. It takes skills. Way to go General Mills for encouraging kids to think!
I like Cinnamon Toast Crunch, My second choice would be Reese ‘s Peanut Butter Puffs oh lets face it they are all good #sweepstakes
Wait a min cookie crisp are still around! That was my favorite cereal growing up!
I love this on so many levels. First I love all the cereals you had and second, I love to do the “make this” out of boxes. That would keep me busy for hours playing LOL