Rube Goldberg Project: Success is Sweet

It worked! It worked! It really did! Nothing went wrong! The pipes worked, as did the seesaws and the tunnels. Every single part of machinery operated just as it should have and put on a miraculous show. And it was easy!

Or was it?

HAHAHAHAHA!

No.

I’d gotten sick on Monday, January 29th, so I worked that day and the next on my project. Due to the the deadline was speedily approaching, I had to take out a step. I had found this lovely old Rube Goldberg machine that I had to put together. It gave me about five or six extra steps, but it kept falling apart. The tunnel that held the basketball collapsed, and the bowling pin, which was supposed too knock over like a domino and pull down a hammer wouldn’t balance on top of the hockey stick. So I had to cut it. It was very disappointing; I had worked extremely hard over every part of the machine, especially that one.

The rules my teacher had sent out for us were that we needed a video in which the Rube Goldberg machine which we had worked on completed its task. It seemed simple at first, but the video turned out to be impossible.

I couldn’t video over the week; my schedule was packed. And Friday I was feeling extremely weak, as I was on Saturday too. So all of Sunday I worked. On the day of the Super Bowl! My whole family was busy so I didn’t get much done. Luckily, we watched the Super Bowl in the same area that I worked on my Rube Goldberg project in so at that time, I worked.

Every second I could, I worked on Rube Goldberg. I popped my head in between rooms every time the Eagles won a touchdown and while the Patriots got the ball, I videoed. But every time I videoed, there was a step that failed. And whenever I tested, without the camera to fix something, the machine worked perfectly.

I was really getting stressed. I was sweating, screaming, and crying. One time, my machine worked all the way too the second last step. And when that happened I just lost it. My screaming woke up my baby brother and then I started to wail. I was that stressed and tired. So for about half an hour, I watched the game. Then, once I was calm, I went back to the project. My sister was there, as was my dad. It still wasn’t working.

My sister’s phone’s battery started to run low. My dad told me that if I didn’t finish fast, my baby brother would come back down. I had about five minutes, TV blaring, and a phone with 4% left.

I tried again. Fail!

Again. Fail!

A couple of changes were made. Fail! The phone was at 1%.

“One more video.” My sister warned. “Then we’re all out.

I accepted defeat.

My heart wasn’t in it anymore.

“Wait.” My sister called. “Do this really quickly. It might help the machine.” We taped a tube and a block down too the board, hoping it would stop the ball from moving till the time came.

There were 5 minutes till the first quarter of the Super Bowl was over. The Patriots and Eagles were neck and neck. I was going as hard as I could, neck and neck with the machine.

“Now or never.” I pushed down the ball. It traveled down, and pushed the marble. The block fell, the string was jerked. The pipes were perfect, but there was one last step. If the ball missed the chess piece, it was all over.

3… The ball traveled down the ramp.

2… The ball was inches from the piece.

1… The ball reached the bottom of the ramp and…

IT KNOCKED OVER! THE BALL KNOCKED OVER THE CHESS PIECE!

I screamed and shouted. The first quarter was over, and so was my project. I ran around the house, drunken with joy. My baby brother was spooked, but I didn’t care. It was an amazing moment.

I enjoyed the rest of the Super Bowl. My team won, but it couldn’t make me any happier than I already was. I’d reached the max in my happiness levels. Now my meter would just keep climbing.

In my success, I must thank one person especially. Of course, I must thank my mom for blocking my brother from my Rube Goldberg area most of the time. My grandma for supporting me. My friends for their kindness. My father for helping me in my moments of need. But most of all, I have to thank my sister. She missed a quarter of her Super Bowl for me. She helped me, did a ton of work, and comforted me so much. She videoed for me over fifty times. If she didn’t get the credit she deserved, I would be a horrible, horrible person.

This project was so important. It will stay with me for a long. But I now that one thing was definitely true, proven by this project. In failure there is now gain, only memories of what could have happened. In success there is a truth that comes out. Many things are great, but can be short lived. Revenge will always be sweet, but success is sweeter.

This is my first stage of my Rube Goldberg project. I’ve broken the whole project into stages to make organization a little easier. Each stage involves approximately four steps.

This is my second stage. It is taken from an above view, so you are looking down on it.

This is my third stage.

This is my fourth stage. It is taken on an entirely different surface and the string attached too the Jenga block here is the same one you see in the third stage.

This is my fifth and final stage. In it, the little speck at the bottom is the chess piece which the marble knocks over.

 

 

Rube Goldberg Project: Last Minute Problems

From the start, when my teacher first announced that we would do this project, I’d had a problem. My schedule was so packed, that I wondered if I’d ever be able to work on my project.

Due to this unfortunate dilemma, I was only able to work on this project on the weekends. And there were only about 4 weekends in which I could work on this project. That was my first problem. My second was that I had a baby brother who destroyed my project twice. And third, was that I needed materials, which I could not easily find anywhere.

I had a whole list of problems that kept on going. Luckily, every problem was solved, some of them not as simply as others. But they were all solved, and soon, my list of problems got very short.

By January 19, I was almost done with my project. The best part was, I had till February 8th to turn it in! That was 20 days, or roughly 3 weeks. All I had to so now, was videotape the project. I didn’t realize how hard that would be till I actually started.

One of my most complicated steps occurs when Jenga pieces knock into a ball which then knocks into a wheel. That wheel is supposed to go under a chair and yank a Jenga piece off from on top of the chair and, as a result, let a marble travel down a path. But the wheel didn’t move enough when knocked into. So the Jenga piece didn’t budge. This was very frustrated. Finally, after a whole weekend passed, I found a solution. This solution came when I mounted the wheel on top of a small block so it could go down a ramp and gain more speed. But even after that, while recording, the wheel didn’t go down the ramp, or the ramp blocked the ball from knocking into the wheel. Once I found the solution to this, which was getting a different ramp that was a bit flatter, I realized the importance of having a plan to look at. Even after this, about 2 days later. I scrapped this whole step and replaced it with a sea saw, I still wished I had a plan too look at. Because by then, I definitely wasted that I hadn’t spent so much time worrying on this.

Many other last minute problems popped up. The one above was definitely more complicated, but the others were challenging nevertheless. Yet I found out that every time a problem came up, I found a quick solution to it if I just focused. My whole experience when making last minute edits taught me that you have to look over a machine a lot. Twice or three times at a minimum. Because otherwise, you won’t be prepared to start the next step. And there’s never a point to do anything in life if you aren’t prepared for it.

This photo shows the step with the wheel that I was having a problem with. This is step one, where nothing has changed.

This is step two, where I have added a ramp

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This is step three. It is a video. In this, I drop the ball onto the sea saw too show what will happen. My goal is for the ball to fall on the sea saw and yank the string. To work this, first press the link. Only do it once or the video will download too many times. The video will automatically download onto your computer. Click on it and watch it. Then, go too chrome://downloads to delete the video.

 

 

 

Rube Goldberg Project: Safety Videos

Many times when I made the Rube Goldberg project, I felt nervous that I would fail. One time, I got so nervous, I just wasn’t able to work. Looking back, I don’t know why I was scared. I mean, I was doing pretty well when it came to my progress rate. But I guess that just happens when you only work on a machine in your own time.

My sister once suggested an awesome idea. She told me to make a safety video. This would consist of a Rube Goldberg machine that was pretty lame. It had about 9-10 steps which I stretched out to make them look like they were elaborate. It would reach the ‘okay’ standards, but nothing more.

At first I ignored this. I was pretty confident. But once I started getting stressed out, I listened.

Quickly, I used the steps which I had made. My sister and I jazzed them up a notch and then we added a chess piece at the end of the machine. And believe it or not, the machine functioned properly after a few tries.

Even now though, when my machine was so simple, there where a lot of problems. The biggest one was having to line stuff up. I had a marble which dropped through a tunnel. But, if not lined up, the marble stopped when the tunnel finished. My solution to that, was marking. I made a black line where everything was to go so I wouldn’t forget.

My sister jazzed up the video, while I worked on another blueprint which showed the changes to the machine which we had made. The idea which my sister had proposed worked great. The one problem that came with it was that I started to get a little lazier when it came too the project after that. This problem was solved later, after I noticed that I was falling behind.

I turned the blueprint in the next day, knowing that I probably would not use it. But, if worse came to worse, at least I had a good video.

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This is my safety video. Due to technicalities, the video downloads when you press this link. Once it downloads, just click the part where the video is shown, and then it will play. After that, you may delete it by seeing all the downloads (chrome://downloads) and pressing the ‘x.’ Remember not too click the link too many times, or it will download too much.

This is my blueprint which I made that supports my video.

 

Rube Goldberg post: Revising and Edits

Any time you do something, whether it’s a book or a machine, you always have to edit it. Otherwise it’s not going to reach the level of capability that it was made for.

Because of this, I made sure to edit my Rube Goldberg machine. I had about 11 steps. But for some reason I just wasn’t that glad with what I had. It was extremely simple. Nothing like a proper Rube Goldberg machine.

I had only used two of six simple machines, and hadn’t even completed my goal of using 4. It didn’t feel good at all, even though I had completed a task. Also, my machine was just too fragile. My baby brother constantly came too my work space and bulldozed it.

I reboarded my train of thought. What could I change? What did I not like? What could be made more complicated? It didn’t come too me immediately. I had too sit and think for  while.

First I changed the ending. Instead of a ball barreling into a chess pace, I made it go down a ginormous tunnel. Then I made a line of dominoes which it would crash into.

For about an hour and a half I was pondering about a bunch of different steps. When I finished, my Rube Goldberg project looked like it was finally going somewhere great. It was actually starting to look like a big, complicated, over engineered machine. I’d had to redo the whole machine, but it was worth it.

This incident taught me the importance of planning ahead and sometimes just stopping to think. Now, if I come across a problem, I know what to do or how to find a solution if I’m stuck. After a little bit of thinking, I was able to come up with a solution and many more. This was an important experience for me that really helped with my success rates during this project.

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The link above shows what my Rube Goldberg machine looked like right before this stage happened. This link above downloads my video to your screen. It will take about 3-5 seconds. The download will appear at the bottom of your screen. Click it, and it will play for you. After that, go too downloads, (chrome:downloads) and it will delete it you press the “x” on it.

 

The video below is something that helped me when I was brainstorming different ways to make my project have more steps.

Rube Goldberg Project: Failures and Success

Building a project is often the most exciting part of it. This is where you go through your main stages of failures and success. I, having built a project that failed, had already went through this phase. But now, using my new structure, I had a lot more fun. First off, my sister was helping me so that provided company. And also, I had learned from my mistakes. Now when I was at a stand still, I always referred back to my old machine and asked myself three questions. How will this step be triggered to start? How will this trigger something in the end? And, most importantly, how might this step fail? If I had properly answered the first 2 questions, which often came very easily, I then listed the possibilities of how this step may not work. I sat and thought about each possibility carefully, because if some of the possibilities seemed likely to happen, then this might not be the most stable step. Of course, there were always some possibilities of why a step wouldn’t work. That’s what made building it fun.

If I had decided to not incorporate a step into my project, I wouldn’t just dismiss it that quickly. I would then try to modify the step so it could work. This insured that all of my ideas were not wasted.

But when building, I tried to always use a variety of steps. For my project to succeed, I needed 8 or more steps, none of them repeating. But I had also set a goal for myself. While building, I wanted to use at least 4-5 simple machines and clearly show them in my project.

Building this Rube Goldberg machine was far from easy. But I worked in stages, or different levels, to help sort my ideas. Each stage was connected, somehow, many times with a block or a ball. I planned to use 5 stages, the last one finishing my project.

While building, I noticed a lot of things in my project. I noticed that the size and weight of a ball mattered immensely while building. Also, I learned to be precise. I marked some of the blocks I used to insure that things would be exact and perfect.

One of the my hardest times came when I had just started to build. I just did not know where too start! I tried building different parts of my machine, but when one step failed, I got panicky, and a bit worried. I didn’t have a steady beginning, middle and end. That wasn’t good. One day, I sat down next too my project. I stopped with the nonsense which I had started for the last few days. I took a deep breath. And properly tried out the first step. None of the steps worked at first, so I did get a little nervous at times. But for the most part, after that, as long as I had something planned to do that day I did it.

My biggest worry in this whole project was my baby brother. I was building downstairs, in the basement, somewhere he had free access too. And while I was at school, I could not keep him out. Also, I had taken his favorite toy for the first step of my project. And I bunch of his books to prop things up. Once my brother came down and stole two of the best balls I had. One of them started my machine. He lost that ball, but gave me the other back. I searched for a good time, but could not find the ball. And no ball worked as its replacement. I tried a lot of things. Finally, I found the ball. Right under my own pillow, like a gift from the tooth fairy! That’s where it was the whole time. This taught me to be a lot more careful about my things and to keep careful watch of my little brother.

I felt the most proud of myself when I had finished a step in which a wheel would be knocked into by a ball. The wheel would then yank off a domino from a higher surface an let a marble roll free. This was a very complicated step. I had to mark a bunch of things and try out a ton of examples. Once I finished, I was extremely proud. Later, my baby brother took the wheel, broke it, and then gave it back. After that, I had to restart the whole step, which I ran into more problems with later.

One of my biggest stand stills was when I completed the second stage. But, ironically, this also lead to my best moments while building the whole machine. The second stage used a seesaw to bring a ball to the ground. But once the ball was on the ground, I was stuck. The ball could not go up, nor could it travel on a flat surface for a long distance. I was stuck for a week. Finally, I devised a plan involving a spool. But where could I find one. I searched the whole house. Nothing. I looked at school. Nothing. Finally, after about 3 days of search, I borrowed a spool from my friend. After that, I was able to complete 2 more stages. And it was all a breeze. Ideas just kept on coming. All because of one failure, that led to my greatest success.

Rube Goldberg Project: Devising Plans

This down below is my first blueprint. It consists of 14 steps and has a key located at the side.

Many times I hear the phrase “Without a good plan, you won’t have a good machine.” A plan is often described as the foundation of a contraption, and without a sturdy base, a building could never hold up.

From the moment my teacher announced that we would start our Rube Goldberg projects, I had already started creating a plan. A Rube Goldberg machine is a device created with different cause effect motions that has a goal to achieve a simple task. My plan started with small, but important things such as whether or not I wanted to work in a group. I decided to work solo when that came to mind. By the time my teacher finished talking, I had already devised some basic plans.

One of our requirements in our Rube Goldberg assignment was to turn in an accurate plan that showed the complexity of the gadget you were planning to build. When I started working on the one I would turn into my teacher, I started by working backwards. Since my machine would achieve the task of moving a chess piece on a board, I began by thinking about how my device would achieve that task. Once I had that idea, I watched a couple of the videos that my teacher suggested. I jotted about a couple of the parts in the video which stood out to me, and then switched them up a little so I wouldn’t be copying.

After I had a good amount of steps, I made a distinctive order and added a few of my own steps. I showed it to my family who offered a couple of suggestions. But in a little while, I had something which I thought was a nice start. I made a couple of pictures to show important steps in my contraption, and then it was perfect. I thought that this was a relatively great plan and as stated by Earl Nightingale, “All you need is the plan, the road map, and the courage to press on to your destination.”

 

This video helped me gather ideas for steps that I could incorporate into my machine. It also gave me a good idea of what a finished Rube Goldberg project looked like.

 

 

 

Rube Goldberg Project: Thinking of an Idea

When my teacher announced that our next assignment would be to design a Rube Goldberg machine, I was exhilarated. A Rube Goldberg project is an apparatus made up of complicated, chain reaction steps that had an objective to complete a simple task, such as sharpening a pencil. This was one of the few projects where we could choose our own partners. I thought that many people wanted to work in pairs, but I enjoy working by myself for a couple of reasons. First, I could work on my own time. Second, I could use my own ideas. And third, sometimes people don’t do an equal amount of work when in a group or they easily get distracted. So I decided that working solo might be a little more useful during this project.

For me, the hardest step of any project is thinking of the idea. It’s always the first step and you can’t do anything unless you have a strong beginning. What I started with was brainstorming. I thought for about an hour about different blueprints and searched up ideas that others had too for inspiration. Finally I got about twenty. After that, I started eliminating projects that were too complicated, too basic, or too accessible. Soon the twenty ideas became three, all of which I had thought of on my own. And, two projects I ruled out almost immediately. That left me with an idea. I wanted to move a chess piece for my Rube Goldberg project. This would be appealing, unique assignment and a challenge that I was ready to take on.

 

About

 

This site helped me understand what a Rube Goldberg contraption was.

Final Rocketry Reflection

Our fifth grade rocketry unit was a very positive experience for me. Even though my groups had some arguments, we still had tons of fun and were able to learn tons of things. Here are some things that I think were important in this unit.

In this rocketry unit I learned many things about groups and rockets. One of the many things that I learned in this unit is that a rocket must be aerodynamic to get a good result. A nose cone should be pointed, and fins should be slanted. Also, don’t use a lot of layers with tape. Just put a small amount. The lighter the better. In addition, I learned to make sure that someone looks over the rocket multiple times. A tiny patch of air can mean the difference between your dreams and failure. Make sure you look over it and test it a couple of times with the PVC pipe. And don’t rush when you build a rocket. Testing the fins or body will never hurt.

In addition, I learned that a there is a fine line between group leader and group dictator. No matter how much you want to do something, sometimes you’ve just got to step down. Otherwise people will lose interest. And if that happens, then frankly it’s not their fault. If you only let you and someone else do things then you can’t complain when someone else leaves the group. I will make sure that in future groups, I insure that no one steps over the line and that everyone gets an equal turn at things. Because that is the only way to make sure that your group is truly successful.

I enjoyed the fact that we had 3 launches in our unit. This was important because there were two chances to perfect your rocket before your final launch. So, for example, if you could not decide between styrofoam or cardboard fins. In one launch you could do cardboard and in the other you could do styrofoam. This way you could compare your prior launches and choose the best option for the third one. Also, we could have a chance to try out different jobs. The only thing was that in my group, two people got to have every job and that wasn’t exactly fair.

While working as a group, I learned many things about myself as well. I realized that I was not that amazing at working with other people but that I could sometimes help when people were on the verge of a fight. I could help people come to an agreement, but if they were all mad at me, then I couldn’t exactly defend myself, even if I thought my idea was amazing. But, in the unit, I did get better at working as a group.

In the rocketry unit I enjoyed the building the most. The prototype wasn’t very fun because everyone wanted to combine different ideas and we had a couple of fights then and the launching and graphing was a little too competitive because everyone wanted to reach the highest height. But during the building we were able to socialize in a positive way and discuss ideas or what we thought wasn’t going well. Then, in addition, we got to talk about what we didn’t like about the past rockets. So, for me, the building was the best part of the unit.

But in the whole entire unit, there was one thing that I learned which I think stands above the rest. Many times in this unit I did a ton of work. I made whole slides by myself and everyone else fed off of my  work. So, in future references, I have decided upon a plan. I will do one thing, and I will make sure that everyone else in my group does something else. And if they don’t do it, then I’ll have proof which I can show and I can finally prove that I actually did work and that my partner was the one who didn’t. But sometimes the problem is that I don’t want to fail. And if my partner doesn’t do anything then I’ll fail alongside them. Yet now, I will make sure that no matter what, I will always do my fair share of the work and no more unless it’s needed.

If I could do one thing over again in this unit, I would change something about our third rocket readings. I personally felt that they were not fair even though I don’t blame the klinometer readers. I think our rocket went so much higher than it was given account for. But everything else, I loved.

As you can see, I learned many things in the rocketry unit. Not only things that pertained to rockets, but also important life skills. And most of all, I really enjoyed the whole rocketry unit. It was important and will definitely help me later on. If I could choose I would definitely do this unit again.