Designing the Machine – Rube Goldberg #2

After we decided on what our simple task would be, we had to decide on how we would make it work. My brother and I made lots of designs, and then we combined them to make one big design, that also led to the simple task of having slime pour on our heads.

 

We started designing by figuring out what we had in our house, so we knew what we could use in our designs. We kept making different designs and showing them to each other. “Look at my design!” “ I don’t like it.” That’s what kept happening, and we could not agree. 

 

We compromised on one design, but we had to test a few things first. We tested some things but some of them did not work, so we knew we could not use it. After that, it was like designing the whole thing all over again. “I want to do this.” “No! I want to do that” That’s what was happening until we figured out what worked. Some things we changed were the dominoes to playing cards, and the ping pong ball to a mini soccer ball. It took a while to agree on everything, but we finally made it work. 

Decision Making – Rube Goldberg #1

In our class, we started a unit on Rube Goldbergs. The first step in the process was to decide what your simple task will be, and how you were going to make it work. I am doing mine with my brother, and we disagreed on what we were going to do.

We first had to decide what our simple task would be. We kept disagreeing and we could not think of an idea. I thought we should do one thing and he wanted to do something else. We compromised and decided his idea would go in the middle of the Rube Goldberg and mine would be the simple task at the end. After a couple of days, we thought about it and the idea that I had was really hard to do, so we came up with something else. We came up with the idea to have a bucket of slime pour on our heads. We will do that by having a pulley, and one string is attached to a book, and the other side is attached to the bucket. We will have the book fall down so the whole pulley moves and the bucket flips over. Ryan and I will be standing under the bucket, hoping that the slime will pour on our heads.

After we came up with our idea, we needed to decide on how we would make it work. I wanted to do the same thing in two places, and Ryan wanted to do something different, so we could not agree if we would do the same thing in two places, or different things. We were disagreeing throughout all of the planning, and it was hard to compromise. Sometimes we would compromise, and sometimes our ideas would be impossible to put together, so we needed to agree on something.