The goal of my machine was to knock over my dad’s king in a chess game.
My resources were Joseph’s machines and two past projects from other students.
My overall feelings on the project were mostly positive but I was stressed. But other than that I really enjoyed making and designing my project and it felt great when it finally worked after 28 tries.I learned how to transfer energy using simple machines and if you try new things you might come up with new ideas. For example I thought using the leaf lower wouldn’t work but I tried it and ended up using it in the final machine. My experience making the video was positive because I had soooo many takes and images to use.
An aha moment was when I realized I could use Legos. This was an aha moment because I have been building with them for many years. This helped me make my simple machines exactly how I wanted to. It was a lot faster to just spend 5 minutes building a pulley than spending an hour looking for one.
One challenge I had was that my marble missed the lever about 13 times. The marble was near the end so I had to reset every single domino. Another challenge I had was that when I made a video explaining how it worked and the machine the video described failed, I had to make a new video. This took a long time and the way I solved it was not doing another explanation until after I had a successful run.
One change that I made was that I took out one Lego projectile of the two because they were hitting each other on the way up my first incline plane. The next change I made was the supports for the pendulum. I changed the support because it moved a lot, and even fell over once. So once I redesigned it, it didn’t move and it held my second incline plane in place. The final change I made was that I made the path to the lever longer. I needed to do this because the marble was missing the lever a lot and I mean a lot. As I mentioned, it missed 13 times out of 28 tries.
My experience creating the video was fun because I got to see the whole progression of me creating my machine. My parents were incredibly supportive and helpful because they were there for all five hours of testing, rebuilding, and filming.
My overall experience was that I had fun and I learned that you should try new things because they can solve a lot of problems.
This is my Wevideo!