In class – and at home – we are working on our Rube Goldberg. a Rube Goldberg is a complex machine that performs a simple task. so far I have my sketch and I have the actual machine complete. my machine might not be the final idea though. the ending doesn’t work that well but I am positive that I will figure it out. I am working with my twin sister on this problem because I think it will be very helpful to have a partner because you can discuss problems and have more ideas. the simple task that we are going to complete is to feed our dog a treat.
when we finished our project, we both felt very accomplished. I was definitely happy. I felt like I had a brick lifted from my back. I was practically smiling from ear to ear – and when I told my parents, they were practically smiling from ear to ear too. when we were working though, it wasn’t the same. I felt really mad and frustrated when an idea wouldn’t work – and that happened A LOT! in the end, I loved my idea and I am excited to try and make it better and work about 99% of the time.
my favorite part of my Rube Goldberg is probably the beginning. the beginning is some sort of pully. It is not exactly a pully but it kind of works as one. basically, you have to open a door, pulling a string attached to it. the string lifts a tube with a gulf ball in it. the gulf ball rolls out and hits a lot of dominos. I really like the setup with that idea but I can’t take credit for it. it was Camilla that was the designer for that idea. I don’t really have a least favorite part of my Rube Goldberg. I love all our ideas and even though some don’t work that well, they are amazing ideas and we will somehow make them work.
It was really hard to come up with our Ideas. we had to do a lot of brainstorming. our ideas were great when we first had them but they would only work about 50% of the time. we had to tweak our ideas and add more parts to make our ideas work all the time.
we had a lot of parts. at some points, I got so excited about using all of them that I forgot about other parts. in reality, we only added a few our the parts that we had. I was really surprised that we had as many parts. basically, all of the parts that we found were in a big closet in the basement. the closet was full of junk and while some people who are just taking a quick look at it would describe it as a closet full of junk, I could see it as a closet full of machine parts.
in our Rube Goldberg, we used 5 simple machines, but we repeated a lot of them. we had 3 inclined planes, 2 pulleys, 1 wheel and axel, 1 wedge, and 1 lever. so technically we have 8.
we had a lot of different sketches but we thought that this one is the best.
