Leo and I named our Rube Goldberg project “Hole in One”, which was a golf-themed project. Our goal was to make a golf ball go in the hole of a golf mat in the basement starting from a simple act of dropping the keys in the kitchen first floor into a small cup mounted on a pulley. We first collected the materials we wanted to use and then made our design on paper.  We added materials and complexity as we went along. After a few tries with Design #1, Leo and I realized that the design had some flaws that we needed to fix. We eventually decided to change some parts of the original design so that it worked better. For instance, in our first design, we started by making a pulley in the kitchen sink that worked when we turned on the tap and water went into a cup that pulled the string on the other side. We noticed that the sink wasn’t deep enough for the pulley to pull the string down as much as we needed. In our new design, we changed this to making a pulley on the kitchen countertop that was held higher on lego blocks and worked well. We made several other changes in our new design including using different materials (heavier/lighter, different sizes, and shapes). We tried to incorporate various simple machines such as levers, inclined planes, pulleys, turning wheels, wedges, etc). Also, after a few tries, we decided to make sure we tested each section of the project a couple of times to make sure we caught and fixed the errors – that helped a lot. We divided responsibility, shared ideas and worked well. We completed the project over two days (approximately 5 hrs each day). Our 34th try was so close and went 95% of the way to completion!  We finally made it on our 51st try and were ecstatic!! We were relieved that the effort paid off.  We took a couple of weeks break making our iMovie and writing blogs but want to do another fun Rube Goldberg Project soon!!