After Winter Break, I met with the group at Alexander’s house, and I found out that they made some changes to the steps of the Rube Goldberg machine, even though most of it was the same. The steps looked pretty much done, and so we tested them a few times.

Some of the steps needed to be aligned more, but it wasn’t too challenging to get the steps into place. Connecting the steps were a little harder, since we had to move all of the steps closer to the side wall, because then our last steps would not be aligned, so we needed to move the tables without bumping or moving anything on it.

However, none of those were as hard as making the triggers that connected the steps that were harder to connect than the others. We used a lot of time thinking on how we should make the trigger, even though we knew what it would do in the end. We ended up making the triggers out of K-Nex, and we made many versions of triggers before we made one that would fit. It was a lever, and weight falling off the table it was on, so when the lever tipped, it released the pool ball, so then it could roll down the track.

The hardest trigger was the last one, because we didn’t know how the pulley would make the stylus hit, so we had to think of another way to build a trigger. We thought the lever was a pretty good idea, so we gave it a shot. To make the weight pull the lever, it had to do with the pulley. We then thought that we could tie that tape roll to a string, also going  down the pulley, so when the bucket went down, the tape roller would also fall, pulling a barrier that would stop the lever from falling. It worked a couple of times, but because it was a tire at the end of the lever, so it would play the song, bounce up, and then fall down again to pause the song. We planned on changing it to the styluses, but then we had to leave. However, we made a lot of improvements.

The other meetings will be less challenging than this one, since the triggers have been created, and all we need to do now is align things and hope our Rube Goldberg machine will work.