Our grade has been working on Rube Goldberg machines for the past few weeks now. If you don’t know what a Rube Goldberg machine is, it’s a chain reaction machine that in the end does something simple. For instance, There might be a Rube Goldberg machine that has twenty steps to pour water into a cup. My group decided that our simple task should be to feed my dog a bowl of treats.
Coming up with steps is very hard. First of all, you have to agree with your group on what steps that you do and you have to make sure they work in your machine. My group has at least 6 steps at the moment, but we are required to have at least 7 working steps. Our steps are: A big eraser on a zipline hits a ball, which goes into an electronic basketball hoop, the ball then shoots out of the basket and hits a bigger ball forcing it off of a table. Then, the ball hits a set of big books that fall on an elevator which has a marble sitting at the bottom. You are probably confused about the elevator so I will tell you how it works. The marble on the elevator is sitting at the beginning of a track. The book that falls onto it gives it a tap which gives the marble speed to go to the end of the track where the elevator is so it will pick the marble up and bring it up to a slide and the marble will roll down it. It is probably still a bit confusing so I will give you an example of the elevator at work in a video. Well, anyways, moving on. The elevator will pick the marble up, which brings it up to another track and then it with hit a bigger marble sending it down a tube on a ramp. The marble will hit a train and the train will go down another ramp hitting another set of books which will fall on a string with will pull a box up that has my dog in it and then my dog will eat the bowl of dog treats next to the box. Wow, that took a long time to explain.
The design process during this process was challenging. At first our design was completely unlike this one. We changed a heck of a lot. This decision set us back at least a week. First we had to think what our new design should be? Then we had to build it. Usually for this project the building shouldn’t take that long but we had to actually BUILD things and figure out how to build these things. Lets just say this costs a lot of tape, cardboard, and string. Also, in my opinion our steps are kind of complex and hard to set up. For example, the elevator. Just think about it, it’s probably not going to be the easiest thing in the world to build a fully functional elevator! Well anyways the building and design process has been pretty rough so far. And I hope that we do not have to change our machine again because then we will not have much time to complete it and our machine works and it is really cool.
Another struggle my group and I had is that we disagree sometimes and it is hard to come up with ideas. I am not going to say who but some of the group members don’t get along the best, but it’s not terrible. For the most part they have been fine but sometimes things can get a little rough. As I was saying, the hardest part is coming up with ideas. sometimes you just can’t possibly think of anything that can work until someone throws out a pretty crazy idea and then we try it and it sort of works. Like the basketball hoop. everybody thought that it would be an epic fail, and that it was really stupid but then it actually did work, which made everybody but the person who came up with the idea feel like idiots. Well that is kind of how idea making works in my group.
Even though there are a good amount of rough patches in my group and in this project in general. With all the fun we had making and designing the machine, overall this was defenetiley much better than bad so far.
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