In our last meeting, we brainstormed some more ideas to use in our Rube Goldberg. I told Matthew and Santi about my acid base reaction idea and they thought it was really cool. My mom showed them the idea with an experiment. We got ready to build a small contraption to have the baking soda fall into the cabbage juice to cause the reaction. We made it by using some tin foil and putting it in a position so the ping pong ball will hit it, spilling the baking soda into the cabbage juice. After we did that, we started building some decorations for our Rube Goldberg. After that, we tested the Rube Goldberg some more, to make sure it is in perfect condition, fixed things that didn’t work, and tried to think of more ideas we could use for our Rube Goldberg. We kept working on  the Nerf Gun idea from last time, but wasted a lot of time because it just couldn’t work properly. After that, we felt we had accomplished a lot and went for a well deserved break.

Our group tested the different steps in our Rube Goldberg. After we tested all of the parts separately, we combined some parts and tested them, like the reverse track (1st blog post) and the chain.

Most of the time, the parts we tested worked, but sometimes they didn’t work and we had to find out what was wrong, change it, and test it again. After we finished testing one part, we would move on and start testing the next part. We tested a bunch of parts and had to use makeshift supports too. Some parts are easier than others, and some parts were challenging like the chains and dominoes. Matthew also brought in a paper funnel we needed for our Rube Goldberg. After a lot of testing we thought we had a pretty solid Rube Goldberg. We also tested some Marble Run things for another part of our Rube Goldberg. Then we took some notes on a notepad and started discussing what we would do in our next meeting.

Currently we are doing a Rube Goldberg project. A Rube Goldberg is a really complex contraption to do a simple task. For example, you could have all kinds of pulleys and levers and tubes and all kinds of other stuff, just to push a soccer ball into a net.

First we made a plan of what our Rube Goldberg would be like, and what the task would be. We decided that our task would be to get a ball into a basket. After we were done with our plan, we started researching ideas for our Rube Goldberg. When we were researching what we could use in our Rube Goldberg, our group, Matthew, Santi and I, came across some videos with some Rube Goldberg ideas we could use. We got this really cool reverse track idea and a bunch of other really cool contraptions like a funnel, a tube, a chain, and some dominoes.

After we got a lot of ideas, we started planning and testing some of our things. Mostly things went well, but when some things got difficult, we got distracted  a bit and didn’t focus on our work. But after a while we got back to our work and got thin done. Some things were challenging when we worked on our Rube Goldberg. For example, some things took lots of precision to set up, and when we tested it, it didn’t even work! Those times got us really frustrated. But after some time, we made it work by moving the parts and trying the parts several times. One part was the reverse track, and we had to make the ball fall on to the track. We fixed the parts but our group had to go back home.

Our Rube Goldberg is still far from done but we are working on it and things are going pretty well. At our next meeting we plan to build and test some more of our Rube Goldberg and move some things to my basement. We will also start planning the 2nd blog post.