On Sunday, Nick and I finished building and recording our entire machine. It has 17 steps. We got a successful run on our SECOND try! It was awesome. When we just started working that day we replaced some steps. For example, we replaced the marble and cardboard tubes with a labyrinth and wooden maze that the marble goes through because we realized that taping the cardboard tubes to the wall wouldn’t work because the tape wouldn’t be strong enough to keep the tubes on the wall. We also took out the soda can and the two cars and swinging bar step. We replaced that because we realized that the swinging bar that gets pushed by the first car wasn’t strong enough to give the second car a good push. Also, we decided to replace the car hitting the books because every time it did, the book would fall backwards because the car was hitting it on the bottom. A final step we replaced was the books at the end that push the soccer ball into the goal. We replaced that because we wanted to get to put in a cool domino part with one domino going on a loop-the-loop and other dominoes on this little thing that has like a wave shape. We really like the dominoes falling.

We also made an important change to the phone step. When the phone received the call from the computer, the word “Mami” appeared on the screen (which is mom in Spanish), so we thought it would be funny to change the name of the caller to “Rube Goldberg”. My dad was there filming and had the idea of putting voiceover when the computer calls so that the people watching our video will hear what’s on the phone’s screen.

When we finished building our machine, my heart was racing. I was so excited and at the same time nervous. Would we get it to work? How many tries would it take? It didn’t work on the first try, but it got pretty far. Nick and I were SUPER frustrated because it was two steps away from working all the way! The step that failed were the mini dominoes hitting the bigger ones. The mini dominoes weren’t strong enough to knock down the bigger dominoes so we figured we had to replace them with the bigger ones. We made that change and… IT WORKED. We couldn’t believe it worked on the SECOND attempt. Nick and I were celebrating like crazy!

 

This is my 5th Rube Goldberg post. Nick and I have started building our machine this week. We tested some parts and found that it’s very challenging to get things to work. We have been working very hard and have had a lot of failures. Sometimes when we were setting up the dominoes, one domino would accidentally fall and knock down ALL the rest which was REALLY frustrating! Other times, the dominoes would be too close to each other, so when we started the machine they wouldn’t fall the way we want them to and that attempt would fail. We realized the dominoes have to be placed about 3/4 of an inch apart from each other to fall the right way. We also think we might need to replace the cardboard tubes that go taped to the wall with something more stable, or replace that step for something else.

Next time we meet, on Saturday, we will continue working on the step with the computer calling the phone and try to finish the design and start filming the entire machine at work. Last time we tried the phone step, the ramp was either too steep or not steep enough. The phone either would get stuck and not move down when called or slide down right away when we put it on the ramp. I hope we get a successful run this weekend. We really want to finish it!

Here are a few videos…

Video #1

Video #2

Video #3

Video #4

This is my second Rube Goldberg post. We’ve made a lot more progress with Nick! We’re almost done with our sketches. The first days of brainstorming our plan were the most challenging. It’s hard figuring out what materials to use and if they’ll give us the result we want them to do. We’ve thought of using pulleys which we think would add complexity, but decided not to because we don’t know how to build them. Instead of a pulley, we are thinking of putting a swinging bar that’s on a track which pushes a toy car. Luckily, the links included in Google Drive for this project were very helpful and found some inspiration. Also, we’ve done some more research individually and got together outside of school to work on this project and find some more ideas for our machine.

For this Rube Goldberg project, I am working with Nick, and we are going to make our machine push a soccer ball into a net under five minutes. We’ve been planning on how we are going to make it, and luckily we’ve made some progress! At first Nick and I decided we were going to make our machine turn off the lights, but then we changed our minds because we both like soccer and we thought the soccer ball idea would be more fun. We’ve been brainstorming on the steps together at school and working on our sketches separately. Right now we have eight steps figured out, but we would like to make it more complicated so that it’s more interesting to watch. What we know for sure is that we want to use several balls that get progressively bigger ending with a soccer ball. We also want to use dominoes because we like the way they fall and the cool sound they make. I hope our machine will be successful!