Hi, today I am going to introduce you to my final project of my Rube Goldberg Machine. This project has taken me over 5 weeks which was pretty hard. First I had to make a sketch for my project, then I had to run to the different stores to find good materials, and then build my project, and then finally record myself with a successful run-through of my machine.

Building my final machine was one of the most difficult parts of this project. One big challenge that I faced was stuff not going together. For example, when I was building the pulley that was one of the hardest things to build because of one big reason, Stuff would not go together. What I mean by that is that I did not buy any of the items pre-built so I had to make the pulley. I had to get wood from a place like Home Depot and then drill the wood together but when I was drilling the wood together we would have problems with it. The main reason why we would have a problem with this was that we would have to be so precise because for example if you drill a hole in the wood to put the two pieces of wood together and it is not lined up it will be really hard to get what you are trying to do done which made time difficult. Overall I thought that the pulley was the most challenging part. In my opinion, I found that the lever at the start of my machine was easier than I thought. When I was first building the machine I thought that I would have to build my own custom lever because I did not think to look around my house but luckily when I was walking to the store to buy my own custom lever I found a big box that worked as a lever which made things really easy to make the lever and after I found the lever it made me think before I would buy every thing to look around my house. After everything was built I had to get a successful attempt which was also really hard compared to the other things. It took me 22 attempts in order to get a clear video of my Rube Goldberg Machine working. Even though that sounds like a lot in time, that is about one hour and a half.

When I made my sketch I thought it was really good so I decided that it would not be changed too much. Although I say that that does not mean I did not make any changes. One huge change I made was how everything was lined up. For example in my sketch, everything was in a line just going forward but instead, I made it so it would make a line before going sideways, and then after going sideways it would go forward. The reason why I made this change was that if everything was straight then first of all I would not have the room for this but mostly because the pulley would be really hard because if everything was in a line if you think about it the pulley would not work which was a big part of my machine. As the screw at the start would be challenging too so overall I made the decision for not everything to be straight.

When I was making the video I thought it was pretty fun but still challenging. In my video, I put in a number of things to explain which a Rube Goldberg machine is: my sketch, Me building it, and me explaining my project, me showing two of my failed attempts, and my successful video. I thought all of this would make a lot of sense in that order because it builds a nice build-up. For example, I start from scratch when I explain what I am making, and then over time I start showing my “blueprint” and then I show myself building it, and so on. Over I incorporated all of those things so I could have a build-up which in my opinion was kind of the theme of the video that I made.

Overall from building my machine to making the video I thought that this project was a very exciting project with lots of parts with challenges such as when building things not going together or not getting a successful attempt. This project was fun and taghut how to face challenges and I really like it.

Just a bit ago I had an assignment where we were going to make a feature article which I had never done before. After our teacher explained what the assignment was going to be I had two ideas in my head on what I was going to write about, the first one would be Madden,  the second one was the NFL. At first I thought that I should do it on madden because I thought it would be the most interesting but after I thought about it, I thought that there was a very important message for football that I though should be heard, the message was football is more that a rough sport it is a game of skill and talent. 

Then I had the right feature article which I thought was very enjoyable but also challenging at the same time. The real challenging part was the fact that I had to approach it as if the person didn’t know anything about football so I had to explain the rules of the game and the subject of the game and how to simply score a touchdown or a field goal. After I explained how to play and the rules I explained the real message through a couple of sections, the sections were times of the football season, beginner’s luck or skill and some historical moments. I though historical moments were really fun to write about because one of the moments  were on my home team the New York Giants when O’dell Beckem .Jr had a crazy catch, although I though historical moments were the most fun beginners luck and talent was a important part of the story because I thought  it really brings out my message in my article. Next I had to write my conclusion which was the shortest part of my story but also the hardest in my opinion. I thought the conclusion was hard because there were so many ways to end it and I just couldn’t decide how to end it so I looked at others from previous years and that really helped me write my conclusion for the feature article. After I did this I had to edit my pieces which, similar to my conclusion, was really challenging because I had to keep looking at it and had to make sure that I was not forgetting grammar mistakes or punctuation  mistakes or anything like that. I found it very helpful 

After then I put my feature article in the slide show which was very enjoyable because I just had to copy and paste my text into my slide show so the only real work was how I wanted my feature article to look when it was done. I tried to stay with one or two designed for each slide which was either one big text box and a picture or two with a little box explaining what was happening or two little text boxes with one or two pictures in the middle or on the right side of the slide which I thought looked pretty 

This is only my second writing piece of the year, my first writing piece was when I wrote my personal narrative, when I compare this writing piece from my last I think my context of my feature article was better and I think I grew more as a writer but I liked writing the personal narrative a little more, I don’t have a specific reason why but I do think I enjoyed the narrative more. After looking back at my writing I am really proud of how I brought out my message in my story because in years past I had a hard time with that. Over all I really liked this unit and thought I did a great job with it. 

Hi I am Blake and today I am going to give you my book review on wrecking ball dairy of a wimpy kid. I think It is a pretty good book book but there are also cons to the book to. One thing I think that they did good was the dialog and the ending, but on the other hand It took a while to get to the problem which did get a little boring. there are more good than con in this book and I recommend this book if you don’t mind waiting 75 -100 page’s waiting for the problem to happen out of 210 page’s.