Rube Goldberg #2

We are still working on our Rube Goldberg. In the last blog post, I was talking about what was a Rube Goldberg, my difficulties, my solutions, and my inspirations. In this post, I am going to talk about the next step in this project.

Some of the failures I had in this part of the project was that sometimes the books wouldn’t topple over or stop midway. The ball also didn’t go the right way. And the marble would go out of the cardboard thing. I didn’t have that many failures. I also found a way to improve them so it wouldn’t happen again.

In my Rube Goldberg, I improved a lot. I think I improved every single step in my Rube Goldberg. The first thing I improved in my project was the first step. I pulled the ribbon and the shoulder rest got lifted and the ball was supposed to go but it went backward or it didn’t hit where it was supposed to. So I put a book beside the ramp so it would go straight where I wanted it to go. The third step was the part where the books would topple over each other, but the last few books weren’t hard enough so I changed them to hardcover books. The most helpful and important improvement I did was putting the Jenga blocks. It added one extra step and it made my Rube Goldberg easier. Instead of the book pushing the marble to go the book pushes the Jenga blocks and the last block would push the marble. We changed this because the book sometimes wouldn’t push the marble. Also even if the book did push the marble, the marble would stop exactly when it was going in the cardboard. But a bad side of the Jenga blocks was that I had to set the Jenga blocks and the books 53 times because it took me 53 tries. We also put tape over the cardboard slide because the marble always got out while going down. The last thing I did was change the last step. I have to thank my dad for the last part because he helped me a lot with the last step. If I hadn’t changed it I would have to do a lot more tries than I have right now.

I also had to change the last step of my sketch because my first design didn’t work and it was very complicated.

I had more success than failure this time. One very big success for me was that the tractor plugged in the computer! I thought this wouldn’t work when I did it, but it did work! Another success I had with my Rube Goldberg is that the Jenga blocks pushed down the marble. And after I improved the cardboard thing, The marble could go down without falling once!

Now onto the video part of the project. This part was actually the hardest part for me. I had to figure out a way to catch the marble going downstairs. We had to put different cameras every few steps of my Rube Goldberg. We had to find a way that they wouldn’t see the other cameras. Also when I was finished, I had to sort all of the fails and other things in a folder. Another thing we had to do was find the part of the success’s in each device. We all took everything in one whole video so we had to cut the parts that were the success parts and put them together.

Some things I learned in this project were how to make a good video, to keep trying, that it feels good to succeed,  how a complex machine could complete a simple task, and the six simple machines that help people’s lives easier.

Even though this was a kind of fun project, I am kind of glad that I am done with it. When I had the successful run I was so happy!! It felt like a rock had been lifted off my back!

 

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