A Rube Goldberg is a contraption with multiple steps to do a simple thing. For example, a Rube Goldberg could use eight steps to do a simple thing like knocking over a cup. 

Designing my Rube Goldberg was challenging,  Some materials that are used in the Rube Goldberg are two levers, seven balls, a toy car, car tracks, cups, an inclined plane, and a book.

Something really frustrating was that I couldn’t find a toy car, it made me go crazy until somebody helped me to find one. And then I realized that I didn’t need two toy cars, I only needed one.

A revision I made was when I changed a pulley to a lever, I saw that two pulleys wouldn’t be compatible with my setup because, in my basement, there weren’t two hooks to hold the pulleys up, there were only one. Another revision I made was when my teacher (Mrs. Robert) told me that I couldn’t have blocks repeating three times in a row.

Instead of having the blocks three times in a row and a pulley, I changed those materials to an inclined plane, cups, a lever, some blocks, balls, and a book.

Before I tested the contraption, I realized that the balls on step 5 could not possibly go up the ramp, so I changed the design. The goal is the same, knock down a cup. But the steps and its design are different.

Somebody’s hand will push the car into the blocks, the blocks will fall on the track so the ball will go down and hit the block, the block will hit the box which will hit a cup which will hit another cup with a ball in it, the ball will roll out and knock down the last cup.

When somebody helped me realize that this plan would never work, that the ball inside the cup wouldn’t be able to knock the next cup down, the design changed. Now a car will come down two inclined planes and hit a block supporting a book, on top of the book there is a ball, when the car hits the block, the book will turn into an inclined plane and the ball will roll down, hit more blocks which will hit a metal book lid. That lid will hit a cup which will knock down the final cup.

Testing this design was very exasperating, the ball that was supposed to hit the blocks kept missing the blocks and hitting the metal box lid instead.