Radical Rube Goldberg!

My class has been assigned one of the most complicated projects yet and I’m so excited. My class is supposed to create a Rube Goldberg contraption, and this is the “behind the scenes of mine…”

A Rube Goldberg Machine:

A simple task done in a complicated manor.


My Rube Goldberg team consists of Julia Hope and I. For this project my team has to create a seven to ten step Rube Goldberg machine that will in the end complete a simple task.


So far we have discovered and tried three different attempts of creating our Rube Goldberg machine. Our first attempt came out a little to much like a fantasy and not close enough to a reality. For example, one of the steps was supposed to have a can send a basketball rolling which would knock a water bottle off a table. It had to include a lot of force that the can did not have.


Our second attempt had contained some good steps and some, not so good. This lead us to a conclusion that we would have to create a third design for our Rube Goldberg. We were extra careful about what we included in our third attempt of our design. We took some of the steps from the second and first design and came up with the second half.


The beginning part of our machine is to pop a balloon. This step is a form of mechanical energy. Our machine also includes rotational kinetic energy. For example, a golf rolls down a ramp, which will send a marble rolling into a circular spinning object. The ball is a form of rotational kinetic energy.

This is our final product!

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