Rube Goldberg #4 – Gauss gun

A while after I finished my sixteenth step, I realized once again that something on my sketch wasn’t going as planned. On my sketch a lego was going to hit a key on a computer which says “Hey siri call home.” It turned out that the lego wasn’t strong enough to press the key. After some inspiration from you tube, I figured out what was strong enough to press the button. It was a gauss gun. The gauss gun is just a ramp with magnets and metal balls. Magnets are placed throughout the track with two or three metal balls behind it. What’s supposed to happen is that a metal ball will roll down the ramp and it will get sucked into the magnet, and the force from it getting sucked in will free the farthest marble from the magnets force. The farthest marbe from the magnet will come out with tremendous speed.

The last marble will shoot out and will fall into a funnel and the marble will hit the key on the computer. The only problem with this is that the last marble that came out had so much force, it would literally knock the funnel over. The solution to this was having a bigger marble at the end so it came out with less speed. The gauss gun wasn’t just a solution, it looked way cooler.

Now I am on step 24 and I hope that I can finish the remaining steps and get a success, when I film my Rube Goldberg.

Rube Goldberg #3 – Fixing Problems

After I finished my sketch, I started building more steps to my Rube Goldberg machine. At first I thought that it would be just as hard to build the next steps as it was before, but I was proven wrong. The sketch helped me know what materials I needed and where to place them. This helped me a ton on timing.The only problem was that some things that I built kept falling down, specifically the keva planks. The sketch only showed how I wanted the keva planks, it didn’t show if it was physically possible or not. I had to make some adjustments to my sketch so my Rube Goldberg was possible.

Another flaw in my plan was the dominos. It was very difficult to set them all up. In addition to that, I am planning  to use 1,000 of them. To solve this problem I put big spaces in between sections of dominos so once I set up one section I wouldn’t knock it over again. Eventually, I would put dominos in the gaps of the sections and hope that I don’t break them. So far I have built 16 steps, and I hope to build even more.  

Rube Goldberg #2 – Sketch

After my group met, I  started building more steps to my Rube Goldberg. I was on step ten in just a few days after my group left. That’s two more steps than what’s expected. Since my group only met once and we didn’t get much out of it, I started thinking about being in a group by myself. A few days later I told my group that I was going to leave their group and work by myself. After that I felt like a huge weight was lifted off my shoulders. I could get the credit for the work that I did. Since our teacher wanted everyone’s sketch next week, I decided to take a break from building and start drawing my sketch. My first sketch didn’t turn out so well. It had lines and bullet points going everywhere. I didn’t want my second draft looking like the first so I put my picture in the middle of the paper and put my notes on the sides. This was much neater and looked much better than my first sketch. I also got an idea for a future step from the draft. It was that a Lego is going to hit the enter key on a computer and that will play my dads voice, saying “Hey Siri Call Home.” There will be a phone nearby and it will call the house phone. So far everything has gone as planned and I hope to keep adding steps to the Rube Goldberg machine. My Sketch has 26 steps, and I hope I will be able to build all of the steps that I drew out.

Rube Goldberg #1 – Choosing Teams

Our teacher introduced us to a new project, making Rube Goldberg machines. Rube Goldberg machines are when something starts a complex chain reaction that does a simple everyday life task.

We started out by splitting ourselves up into groups, partners, or working alone that we wanted to build the Rube Goldberg machine with. My group including three classmates: Eli, Reece, and Chase.Next, we tried to make plans on when we were going to meet with each other. We decided to work with each other on Mondays and Fridays. After that we decided that the Rube Goldberg machine was going to be at my house because of all the building equipment that I have.

Our days that we were going to meet didn’t go as planned. One group member had to go to a sports event and other members had conflicts. Since we couldn’t meet I started working on the Rube Goldberg alone. I started by making a drawing of what I wanted my machine to look like, then I started building it. While I was building it I found that I couldn’t get to the top of the table from the ground. It took hours for me to figure out a solution. My solution was having a tennis ball make a wind-up car move which made another wind-up car move on top of the table. I was making progress. I was already on the 6th step before my group could even meet.

Then, on the Monday after the Rube Goldberg was assigned, my group came over to my house to work on the Rube Goldberg machine. The only problem was that my group didn’t want to work on the Rube Goldberg machine… they wanted to play on my Xbox and eat snacks!  After two hours of meeting, all we accomplished was one less step than I started with because one of my group members accidently knocked the pieces of a step down on his way out. I managed to fix it, but it took time.

I hope that in the future when my group meets we will be more productive.

The Great Kindness Challenge

Kids this week have been participating in the Great Kindness Challenge.

The Great Kindness Challenge is a series of tasks that you check off while you do them, which includes saying thank you to crossing guards, slip a friendly note into your friends backpack, give an apple to your teacher, smile at twenty five people, and many others. The point of the challenge is to get people into good habits like being kind. Teachers don’t want kindness to last just one week while the challenge goes on, but to keep being kind throughout life.

The week started out like it usually does, there was some kindness here and there, but it was usually a mixture between kind and unkind. As the week progressed students became much more kind motivated by the kindness challenge. The question is why can’t the kindness last after the Great Kindness Challenge? I hope that this year the kindness will progress even after the great kindness challenge.

The Great Kindness Challenge was a fun activity for students to over the week. Hopefully the Great Kindness challenge will also improve kindness.

Martin Luther King Junior

Martin Luther King Jr. was a great man who changed America. Back in the early and mid 1900’s life wasn’t equal between black and white people. They were kept separate, this was called segregation. They were kept separate in water fountains, bathrooms, and even some public places. In almost all cases white people had the better of them. He was born in 1928 into a black family. His first name was Michal. When Michael was five Michael Luther King Sr. changed both his and his sons name to Martin Luther King in honor of a famous leader.

Martin attended college at the age of 16 at More House University (a mostly black school.) This is where Martin started thinking about ways he could help the civil rights movement.Nine years later in 1953 Martin married Coretta Scott. Two years after that, a woman named Rosa Parks wouldn’t give her seat on the bus to a white man, even though it was against the law. This got Rosa Parks thrown in jail. Martin took part on a boycott on buses until they could sit wherever they wanted. Seven years later in 1963 Martin said his famous I have a dream speech at Washington D.C. Soon after that discrimination based on race was illegal

Martin goes to Memphis to help trash workers who are on strike, but gets shot on his second day there.

Without Martin who knows what the world would be like today. There could still be segregation.  Martin was a great man who had a huge impact on America.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1pIl5gkGJZy6GYTBWQShsx_yC7Rdb0eVW/view

Rocketry Reflection

Here is my rocketry slide show that me and my group made. It was a hard  but fun experience making our rocketry slide show.

It explains our rocketry unit witch includes designing, building and launching our rocket. To sum up our rocketry unit we presented our slide show to show our parents.We showed how fun the unit was and how it was cool to build our own rockets. It was hard to memorize our groups lines because in the presentation our slide show was in present mode so we couldn’t read our lines of the screen. Meanwhile our group had to compromise a lot on what to show in the presentation.

This is our rocketry slide show!

This is our rocketry presentation!

https://youtu.be/L0nADlw0F6g

 

Thanks for watching I hoped you liked our presentation!

 

 

 

Passion Project Reflection.

I wanted to learn more about the wars that the U.S. has fought so I chose that for my passion project. I wanted to learn about the causes of the wars and the battles. I decided to my passion project about a little bit of all of the wars that the U.S. has participated in.

My first idea was doing U.S history but then I narrowed it down to military power. After I wrote my introduction I decided that it was not about the military power it was about the wars the U.S. fought so I changed it to U.S wars. The web that I used was on google drive and I put a shape in the middle showing my topic and the shapes on the outside were possible narrowed in idea.

My first questions sounded like this. Who were the battle heroes. After that it was about what they did and why they’re famous. After that I did questions like did they have any help from spies and people worked for them.  

Next I started doing research. I first put on all the ideas i had prior knowledge on, on the page. Next i did my research on the topics I did not know like the French and Indian war and world war I. After that I started filling in the gaps by researching the topics that I know to complete my pages that I had prior knowledge for.

Next I started putting the slides together. I did in in time order so the french and indian war first and the cold war last. After I started editing it so it sounded better. Most of the edits were putting the period after the S in U.S. And that is how I made my slides.

This is a link to my google slides.

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1Amq9waWsXKYH-SgVFB_Qnw-ClBn4Dc1ng0ElVEo8Nec/edit#slide=id.g2e26b1ed99_0_0

Reading partnerships two

I think that Tess wants Aron to be exactly like her. She said “I hope Aron knows how to play Monopoly”. She also said that “I hope Aron would like being on an island like I do”. Tess likes  playing monopoly so she wants Aron to be like her. She also told Libby  “don’t you want Aron to be like you?”  Tess also keeps asking Aron questions like do you no how to play monopoly or do you like boats? This shows that Tess is trying to get to know Aron but is also trying to see if they have the same interests.  At this point Aron and Tess don’t really have the same interests other than boats and Tess dose not like it. That is why she keeps asking random questions to find the same interest.

Plant life cycle

We have been studying plants the whole life cycle and learned about photosynthesis and other things about plants. The leaves looked crumpled up and an unhealthy purple after we did pollination. After pollinating pods started to grow with seeds in side. Our stem started leaning over and was purple. The soil was also very dry. Because the soil was very dry it did not get a lot of minerals and water. The plant needs minerals to survive without them. We have grown bigger pods from the last blog post. Our plant’s leaves have died and the stem is wilting. Our flowers have also disappeared and the petals fell off. It seems like after pollinating it dies. I wonder why this happens. I think this happens because the petals no longer have to advertise and there is no point of the plant because it already reproduced. Our pods haven’t had a chance to grow very big so I think there will be a small number of seeds. It has two lumps in it so I think there are going to be two pods. We have seven pods now. I have learned that the leaves soak up sunlight and have chlorophyll to make food. I also learned that photosynthesis is the process that plants use to make food. Pollination is when some pollen touches other pollen it makes seed pods to make new life.The stems job is to keep the plant strait and the flowers pollinate. We cracked open the seed pods and and tried to guess how many seeds were in a pod. There were about three in each pod. Only big pods had seeds in them. I wonder how the plants pollination creates a seed.