Almost everybody knows that a Rubik’s Cube is a 3D mechanical puzzle with six different colors on each side that can be shuffled and turned back into their original layout, with each of the six faces completely one color.
What everybody does not know, however, is how to solve a Rubik’s Cube. It’s a skill that takes spatial reasoning skills, logic, and a lot of patience, which is why it is remarkable that two West Windsor brothers, Jakob Degen, 12, a Community Middle School sixth grader, and his brother, Julius, 8 and a third-grader at Maurice Hawk, have learned how to solve the puzzle in under a minute.
Now they have teamed up with their father, Helmut Degen, and Craig Frame, an A and E math teacher at Community Middle School, to teach other children how to solve the Rubik’s Cube, as part of an effort to win a spot in the Guinness Book of World Records for the most people to solve the puzzle at one time in one place. The current mass cubing record is 711, set by a school in South Africa last year. The local world record attempt, originally planned for May 19 on the football field at High School North, has been pushed to January 6, 2013, with the idea of achieving a new world record with a convincing 1,000 participants.
“Everybody loves a world record; you don’t have to convince people that it sounds interesting, so achieving the world record is a nice reward and motivation,” says Degen. “But more important is the idea of kids helping other kids and growing from the experience. My son learned how to solve the cube a year ago, and now he’s teaching other kids. Kids step out of their role as students very quickly and become teachers themselves. They learn responsibility and contribute something to the community at that age. When each kid turns into a teacher, they grow an inch, and that’s a wonderful thing.”
The group is still looking for volunteers at different schools to help teach students how to solve the Rubik’s Cube. Not just students but parents, siblings, and the rest of the extended family are invited to participate. The following schools are involved: Millstone River, Village, Grover and Community middle schools, and high school South and North. In fact, as part of the recruitment effort, there are practice sessions held at High School North every Thursday night from 6 to 7 p.m. in the lower dining hall.
“What I envision is getting additional support from the schools by adding this to the curriculum,” explains Degen. From the perspective of Frame, a math teacher who instructs children who have highly developed math and reasoning skills, it makes sense. “This event is about fun and learning,” he says. “The cube tests your spatial aptitude and ability to apply learned algorithms.” The world record effort is being sponsored by Siemens, a German electronics and electrical engineering company that has a corporate research center in Plainsboro. Degen works there as a computer scientist and consultant in the software and engineering industries.
“A few months ago I approached our CFO about sponsoring the event and right away, he agreed,” says Degen. “It’s something that fits the Siemens culture and promotes the idea of supporting community and education and helping children learn how to think. It’s all about technical and spatial thinking and this fits the company’s agenda and business.”
There are two major costs associated with the world record effort. Everybody will receive a T-shirt, and then there is the cost of validating the world record. For the price of $7,000 that Siemens is picking up, the Guinness Book of World Records will send an adjudicator to confirm the record on the spot and confer a certificate providing the proof.
Degen and his family moved to West Windsor from Germany in 2007. His wife, Britta, was an executive assistant in Germany. She has a masters in history and Slavic Studies and has a gift for languages. She speaks Spanish, Russian, English, German, and French, and has also learned Polish, but will be the first to admit that she has not learned how to solve the Rubik’s Cube herself, and that’s completely fine with her.
Degen earned an undergraduate degree in computer science with a minor in economics from the University of Karlsruhe, and then followed that with a masters degree in computer science and minor in philosophy and then a PhD in information science.
His education and experience in the world of technology have convinced him that it’s the connection between people and technology that is crucial. “To be in this world is to be around people,” he says. “Technology is just a tool; everything needs to make sense in the context of people and the broader picture and it has to all weave in together.”
Helping children develop their brains with the Rubik’s Cube is only one part of Degen’s fascination with the process of learning and how children go about absorbing new information and skills. For about a year starting in February, 2010, he was working on a long-term work project in Canada that took him away from his family during the week.
“I was thinking about what I could do to give something back to my family and make up for lost time with my sons,” he says. So he wrote stories for them, and then, when he returned home to West Windsor on the weekends, he would share them with the boys at bedtime.
“These were stories about the animals in the garden, rabbits, and groundhogs,” he explains. “So then I had 12 stories, and thought, what shall we do with these stories? Let’s publish them! The kids said you have to have illustrations. We posted the job on our website and 30 people from all over the world applied for the job to illustrate our book. And that’s how we chose Manuela Soriani from Italy to illustrate the pictures.”
Degen’s book, “What are we going to do today? Brilliant ideas with Hoobsy and Dubsy,” is available on Amazon.com and on his website: www.hoobsy-dubsy.com. Degen says he wrote the stories about animals his children knew from their backyard garden and designed them to inspire kids to explore their own ideas and think outside the box.
“What I wanted to do was to connect the stories in the book with real life,” says Degen. “There is an interactive element of wondering how the story will end that engages children. It asks for their opinion so they feel important and valued. I think innovation and out of the box thinking is not taught enough in our schools. They can be so exam-oriented that there is not enough space for that. These stories are humorous and give children the chance to think and be very creative.”
Degen says it is difficult to measure innovation and to put it into an academic framework. “Being creative is a lifelong endeavor,” he says. “You have to be creative no matter what job you do, so engaging children to think and be innovative is the constant work of parents and educators.”
Degen is making the round of school book tours, bringing his fun-loving groundhog brothers to classrooms to encourage creative thinking. “By giving them the chance to think outside the box and provide their own endings, the children become authors themselves,” he says. “So we speak on the same level.”
As for the Rubik’s Cube event, Degen is thrilled to have the chance to engage district students on such a mass scale for a common goal. He recalls that his older son’s fascination with the cube started in the fifth grade at Millstone River School, when he was assigned a math project and happened to find an old Rubik’s Cube in the house.
“We played with it and I helped him with the research, which was about developing algorithms to solve it,” says Degen. “That was the start, and now we are trying to go for a world record. It’s a moving target that literally goes around the globe and the record keeps getting broken, but we are determined to bring the world record here to the WW-P school district. That would be a true accomplishment for the kids.”
For more information and instructions on how to solve the Rubik’s Cube, visit https://recordcubers.blogspot.com/.
