The newest addition to Boxerwood’s Play Trail, The Roto-Rain-Recycler, was featured in the January 3, 2018 edition of The News-Gazette. The Roto-Rain-Recycler is the invention of VMI mechanical engineering professor Jay Sullivan. A Rube Goldberg-type machine (i.e., unnecessarily and delightfully complicated), it is designed to collect rain water from the new roof recently raised over the Mud Kitchen and dump it into a rain barrel. Why? So that preschoolers can reuse it to make messy mud pies and clean up afterward, of course! But the kooky chain-reaction mechanisms have a deeper purpose: to introduce simple machines to young children and inspire them to someday engineer their own solutions to environmental problems like water run-off.
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