Rube Goldberg – Post #3

At this point, Nick and I are done with our sketch. When we got together outside of school, we exchanged ideas on what we thought could be fun steps to add, and then we chose the best ones to add to the final sketch. One of the hardest ones is getting the computer to call Nick’s phone to make it vibrate. Nick actually tried a cool new way to do it and it worked, so we’re probably going to do that! I guess that when we start building the machine, it’s likely that we’re going to make more changes like that. I think that maybe new ideas will come to us or that we’ll have to make changes because some of the steps that we put in the sketch may not work.

Here is my sketch…

Nick has been a really good partner. He is excited about the project, like me, and contributes good ideas. We tend to agree on most things and if we don’t, it’s something minor. I really feel good about working with a partner because if one of us is having trouble figuring something out, the other can help. Working with a partner can be hard if you are constantly disagreeing, or if one ends up having to do most of the work and gets frustrated, but that’s not the case here.

 

Rube Goldberg – Post #2

This is my second Rube Goldberg post. We’ve made a lot more progress with Nick! We’re almost done with our sketches. The first days of brainstorming our plan were the most challenging. It’s hard figuring out what materials to use and if they’ll give us the result we want them to do. We’ve thought of using pulleys which we think would add complexity, but decided not to because we don’t know how to build them. Instead of a pulley, we are thinking of putting a swinging bar that’s on a track which pushes a toy car. Luckily, the links included in Google Drive for this project were very helpful and found some inspiration. Also, we’ve done some more research individually and got together outside of school to work on this project and find some more ideas for our machine.

Rube Goldberg – Post #1

For this Rube Goldberg project, I am working with Nick, and we are going to make our machine push a soccer ball into a net under five minutes. We’ve been planning on how we are going to make it, and luckily we’ve made some progress! At first Nick and I decided we were going to make our machine turn off the lights, but then we changed our minds because we both like soccer and we thought the soccer ball idea would be more fun. We’ve been brainstorming on the steps together at school and working on our sketches separately. Right now we have eight steps figured out, but we would like to make it more complicated so that it’s more interesting to watch. What we know for sure is that we want to use several balls that get progressively bigger ending with a soccer ball. We also want to use dominoes because we like the way they fall and the cool sound they make. I hope our machine will be successful!

Plant Experiment #1

My class has been learning about plants. For this project we had to come up with a question we were wondering. My groups question was if a plant can survive on Gatorade instead of water. My hypothesis (which is a prediction in science) was that a plant would NOT survive with Gatorade because it needs to have water to survive (like humans). For this experiment I had 2 quads with 3 plants in one cell (that would be 24 plants in total). 1 quad was control the other was the manipulated quad (the manipulated quad is the experimental quad). The control quad has sun, water, fertilizer pellets, and soil. In the manipulated quad the variable that my group changed is Gatorade instead of water. What I was observing is that my hypothesis was half right because half of the plants were not growing! But the other half was.
Displaying yellow group2.JPG
My group was observing that the measurements are always changing by ½ cm in the control quad and ½ ml in the manipulated quad. The color of the plants in the control quad are green and the color of the plants in the manipulated quad are red+green, my group thinks that the plants in the manipulated quad are red+green because the Gatorade color is red. The amount of leaves are 6 in the control quad and in the manipulated quad there was 4 in one of the cells and 2 in the other. The size was about 1 cm in the manipulated quad and in the control quad was about 5 cm.