For the past month, I’ve been getting ready to build a successful Rube Goldberg machine. Finally, today, on the 10th try I’ve succeeded after many many ups and downs, and changes. But, all that didn’t happen in my 10 tries. There was a whole rollercoaster ahead.
It first started out about two weeks ago. I had a sketch, and I had finally decided to work alone, but Jane didn’t like this idea. She hadn’t started yet because we were originally working together, which was a slight problem. The bigger problem though, was that we waited till a week later to start building. I thought we had time, but then I realized that so many people had already started, and I hadn’t thought about due dates because I lost my log that we got during the first week.
It was now Tuesday night and I had stepped up my game and tried to work independently. I thought it was a good idea, but Wednesday was the day my housekeeper came and so I sadly had to break what I had apart. After school on Wednesday, I began re-building and building on more again. This was the part when things got bad. Since Jane and I had split up, we started arguing on materials and places to build. I had started building in my room, but my plan totally backfired because my idea failed. Now we both wanted to work on a hard surface large area, which we didn’t have many choices in the first place because my cats would need to not be able to reach the build which would probably be up for at least 1 night. That night we both didn’t get any progress done and made a big decision. We decided to work together is actually going to be more productive, and we can use both of our sketches combined and build the machine in our dining room. I was feeling a lot better now, and more confident.
During Thursday and Friday, we began testing out ideas for the dining room, gathering materials, thinking of things that might work, planning, etc. We were really excited and confident because by Friday afternoon after school we had really good ideas and the right materials! My mom also helped us think of the goal idea “Feeding Our Cats Without Leaving Her Room” because my mom loves to sleep late on weekends and the cats get fed a lot later.
Saturday morning was when we were officially ready to build. All day long we worked hard and built the whole thing many times. Our idea was that there would be a rope that my mom would pull from her room, which would release the Rube Goldberg machine to start, going down the stairs, and into the dining room where the cats get fed. By the end of Saturday, the whole machine was built, and we planned that Sunday we would record and make our Blog Posts.
Then, Sunday morning we had our plan and started recording. I felt like the machine we built would work in 1 try, because we did test everything in different sections when building and they all seemed to work, but surprisingly on the 1st try the balls going down the tube, in the beginning, got stuck! We tried till the 3rd try and it still wasn’t working. We realized the balls were too big, but I was confused because every other time on Saturday it worked! By the 8th try, still, everything kept messing up, but we kept fixing it. On the 9th try the whole machine worked except on the last step when the bottles were supposed to pour food and water in the cat bowls, it didn’t pour. We realized that adding the food in the bottles made them heavier and so they weren’t being lifted by the pulley. The solution was to only put a small amount of food and water in the bottles, and add magnets on the weight so it would be heavier. Finally, on the 10th try, my mom was recording and said this was the last time before she took a break, luck granted us and the whole machine worked! We were all so so happy.