Being Precise
I realized when I was testing my Rube Goldberg with Eli that you need to be very precise with where you place each object. We were not that focused on making sure each piece would work. If one step in your Rube Goldberg is off, the whole thing won’t work and then you have to reset every single step. It saves time when you have your steps lined up the right way. Most of our fails were because a domino didn’t hit our marble in the right place or the Magnatile blocking our train was too close to the edge of the track. When there was a fail, then we would have to set the whole contraption up again and it would waste a lot of time. When you are trying to get a success, you need each step to work so having one careless mistake makes you reset everything.
We also had to make sacrifices so that each step would work. For example, we had our Jenga pieces making too sharp of a turn and it was not working consistently. To make it more consistent, we made the turn not as sharp. At the beginning we were willing to take risk. As the Rube Goldberg started to fail more and more we knew we had to play it safe. That’s why our first success came when we had taken a ten minute break to charge the cars and go over each step. I also realize that little things can go wrong that you do not expect. For example, we thought the Anki overdrive car had only one problem and that is it wouldn’t get pushed onto the track. Then we realized sometimes when the Jenga piece hits it, it would drive off the track or it would slip off the track because of the water. A lot of these things could have made us frustrated, but instead we just tried our best to set each step up as well as we could. By the end, the steps were getting to be more consistent.
I like how you got really specific and down to the point, which made the entire blog post more interesting. Youe specific blog post tested my mind because I had to picture your explanation. It enabled me to not only see the writing, but to more deeply appreciate what you were proposing. This was extra clear because of how you payed out this blog post, like all of the other posts. I liked how you said, “We also had to make sacrifices so that each step would work.” This sentence made me think, “What sacrifices?” What I am trying to say is that you made me feel like I was in the moment, which made your post more interesting, and made me more deeply process each and every word. Great!