March 7

Rube Goldberg Blog Post 6

Rube Goldberg was a wonderful experience and I wish I could do it again. Although I loved working with 2 of my close friends (Graham and Jason), I loved testing the machine a tiny bit more. I was happy yet sad when we finally got a success, happy because it worked and sad that it was over. We had captured the successful run on video. Graham took the video and edited it.(Video Below)  We added effects, music and put in video clips of the failed attempts.   After we finished the edits we had our final video. It turned out pretty good and exceeded my expectations!

Working on this project, I learned how hard people work to create items for our everyday use.  For example, the light bulb. Thomas Edison must have worked hard to make light bulbs that we use today. He must have tried many many times to create his invention.  I am sure he got discouraged with all of the failures, just like we did when our machine kept failing.  Like Thomas Edison, we kept going and finally got the result we wanted.

The project also was a step for me learning how to manage my time. For all of the different due dates I had to think ahead and plan when I could get things done.  I know that I will have lots of projects like this in middle school, so I think it was helpful.   Planning ahead is important. I think we could have gotten a few more meetings in if we had planned more in advance.  Although we got everything done on time, we could have completed each step faster or we could have added more steps to our machine if we had more meetings.  Plus the meetings are fun, so I would not have minded having more of them.

The Rube Goldberg project was an awesome experience and I would love to restart!

March 4

Rube Goldberg Blog Post 5

We did it!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! We finished our project, the machine worked!!!!!!!!! (on take 21 or something).

Our final meeting began with us jumping right in!!!!!! We had about 5 fails before we succeeded in our last meeting.

On the first attempt, step 3 failed when the car missed the popsicle sticks. On our last 4 attempts (before our success) the popsicle sticks kept missing each other, therefore the step 4 failed. This past meeting was the last meeting we are going to have. It was the best meeting because it was good to experience the feeling of success and I wish we could do the project again!