Parents around the world often urge children over and over wash your hands! This advice was already common before the coronavirus crisis. Now there is added pressure on children, as well as adults, to wash their hands even more. It can be difficult, however, to get children to remember to wash and many are likely to resist. But what if washing hands was connected to a fun, creative activity? What if instead of simply reaching for the soap, a machine could drop it right into your hands? Well, such a machine was recently built by a boy and his sister in the U.S. state of Maryland as part of a creative competition. The not-for-profit Rube Goldberg organization is holding the competition. Rube Goldberg was an American cartoonist, engineer, and inventor among other things. He was known for his complex chain reaction machines. On the organization’s website, Goldberg’s granddaughter Jennifer George describes such a machine as an overly complex “wacky contraption that in the end does a very simple task.” Every year, the Rube Goldberg competition considers inventions made from everyday items that use complex systems to carry out a simple task. At first, the task for 2020 was supposed to be “turn on a light.” But when the coronavirus pandemic happened, the task was changed to “drop a bar of soap into someone’s hand.”