Finishing the Rube Goldberg plan

This time Barbara, Hana and I (Caitlyn couldn’t come) were at my house. We were finishing the plan that was due on Wednesday. We thought we would use train tracks after the plastic.

Then we were stuck. We couldn’t think of anything and were getting a little stressed. After a lot of stressful thinking we thought of maybe doing toilet paper but that wouldn’t be strong enough to push the cup of candy plus we wouldn’t have enough steps. So we thought and pondered.

Since we were having a sleepover Hana had her wash bags. Suddenly we realized. What if we used bottles to knock over the toilet paper which knocks over another bottle which hits a cup of candy that makes the candy go into a trick or treating basket?

Perfect, we had come up with an 8 step plan.

Here is our sketch:

Second and third Rube Goldberg meeting

For our second and third meetings we had taped down the structure and we decided to work on our plan. We drew out everything we had already done. Then we tried to think of some ideas for the plan.

While we were thinking Caitlyn, Barbara and I thought of maybe doing a zip-line from one part of the wall to another. The more we thought about, the more reasons not to it came up. How would we attach it to the wall without peeling the paint with tape, how would the marble get onto and of the zip-line and  more.

We tested the marble run a few times and then it broke. We had to tape all of it back together witch wasted quite a lot of time. The dominoes we had last time didn’t really work on the carpet so we moved the whole thing on to a cardboard box. We added that to are sketch as well.  After the two meetings we hadn’t accomplished much, but we had many more days until the project was due.

Our first Rube Goldberg meeting

Before even our first meeting as a group we learned who Rube Goldberg was.  We learned he was a cartoonist who drew crazy machines to do simple tasks such as brushing your teeth. Than we watched some videos about Rube Goldberg machines. Finally it was time to pick who we wanted to work with. My partners are Hana, Barbara and Caitlyn.

For our first meeting we met at Hana’s house. We worked in her basement, and got to work. We started building a step. It was a wooden marble track. We decided to connect it to a little car track for the marble to go through. Then we decided to add dominoes so the marble hit them, they fell and it hit another marble. Unfortunately that didn’t work and we had to scrap the idea. We also tried to use magna-tile-like magnets for a step but it kept falling down so we couldn’t use that idea.

After a while our moms picked us up and we left, thinking of what to do next time.