Category Archives: Science

Rube Goldberg #2

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My experience designing a Rube Goldberg machine has been amazing, all of the steps were so fun. My favorite part was definitely when the machine worked. It felt so good to be successful.

I learned a lot about simple machines, I think the most useful simple machine that I used in my contraption was definitely the inclined plane. I used the ramp twice. I also think that you should stay calm in situations because if your idea does not work you have to improvise.

I took a lot of inspiration from my sister, because I watched her build her Rube Goldberg contraption three years ago.

I watched some YouTube videos of other peoples Rube Goldberg machine, and I think it’s cool how our videos will be up there. Making the video was nice, because you got to see all of the work in one video.

 

My list of resources:

YouTube

Wikipedia

RubeGoldberg.com

 

 

My sketch:

 

My video:

Rube Goldberg

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The process for designing the machine and testing it was really fun! I loved coming up with ideas. Something that was challenging was finding the materials, but I got a lot of inspiration from YouTube videos, and from my sister.

So far my testing was good, something that has been frustrating was some of the ideas that I was coming up with, that I thought were really good, were not working. I had a few challenges here are some of them:When I was building I had a three foot drop in my build, but that was not working so, I made an inclined plane for the ball to roll through. Another challenge I came across was I had a golf ball going down an inclined plane and it kept on flying out of the ramp so I changed it to a different ball and then it worked.

My “Aha moment” was when I was building, my first step originally was a marble would go down a structure and hit a toy car, but the problem was that the marble was not heavy enough to move the car. This was a big problem because without this step the whole project would not function. I tried to change the car to a ball but the marble still would not move it. So I decided to remove the whole marble run step completely, and start of with the car going down the ramp. Then I added a fan at the end of the Rube Goldberg.

Overall my Rube Goldberg journey has been great.

Here is a picture of my sketch:

 

Balanced and Unbalanced Forces

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In science we are  learning about balanced and unbalanced forces. We created two models to show balanced  and unbalanced forces. In this project, I learned what friction is. One thing that was challenging was making a blog post. One thing I enjoyed was watching Brain-pop. I hope you learn about a balanced force and an unbalanced force that creates a net-zero!

 

This picture of tug of war is an example of Balanced Forces because  each  side has equal people.

This picture is an example of unbalanced forces because each side is unbalanced.