Rube Goldberg #6

My overall experience with Rube Goldberg was enjoyable. I learned so much more about Rube Goldberg than I knew about before. When I went to camp and we did Rube Goldberg machines, we did small machines, like 3 steps. I had never done 8 or more steps before. That required a lot more work. At camp, the materials were already there for us. At home we had to buy materials and find materials. Also, at camp, all you did was make the machine. You didn’t have to design or verify the steps before building. At school, we had to make and design 8 verified steps.

 

What I liked about Rube Goldberg was how fun it was – it was not a boring school project. I liked building the machine and trying to make it work. I also thought that working with a partner would be better than working solo. With a partner, you can get more work done with two people doing different things at the same time. My partner was a good partner because he did his share of the work and we didn’t fight about the ideas we wanted. In conclusion, me and my partner’s Rube Goldberg machine did pretty well because it worked on the 12th attempt. And if you are interested here’s our video:

 

Rube Goldberg #5

I faced some problems during our Rube Goldberg project. The first problem was finding times that worked for me and my partner Alex. We decided to work on Tuesdays and Thursdays because we wanted to work before we went to hockey practice. But it did not work out because I got sick and then Alex got sick. We had to work on the project whenever we were both available. The next problem was finding the materials to match our design. We were not able to get all the materials so we had to make changes. We couldn’t get a certain type of hot wheels track so we borrowed a different hot wheels track from somebody else. We also needed a big tube cut in half, but we couldn’t cut it in half, so we had to work around that. Another problem was building the machine. The first step took half an hour to build because it involved home made materials and lots of tape. We also had problems getting the right type of dominos for the machine. I learned from these problems that if you don’t have exactly what you need you can always work around it.

Rube Goldberg #4

After we finished designing the machine, we started building it. It was hard. The first step we needed to build a tall starting point and that took thirty minutes. It was hard to figure what materials to use and how much tape to use. It was also hard to know how tall to build it. We were able to build it because we got help from my brother and my partner’s mom.  Building the rest of the machine was easier because we didn’t have to use tape or homemade materials like we needed for the first step.

 

After we built the machine, we started trying to make it work. It didn’t work until the 12th attempt. In some steps we had too many dominoes. Or in one step, we didn’t have the right type of material. Balls that we needed for the project were too light so we switched and we made changes. All of our changes were changing materials. We did not change any of the design.