My group and I included the following simple machines:
inclined planes - also known as a ramp, is a flat supporting surface tilted at an angle, with one end higher than the other, used as tool for raising or lowering a load.
Wedges - a material consists of two inclined planes, giving it a thin end and thick end .
wheel and axle - a simple lifting machine consisting of a rope which unwinds from a wheel on to a cylindrical drum or shaft joined to the wheel to provide mechanical advantage.
lever - a simple machine made of a bar resting on pivot that is used to support heavy load when force is applied on the other side
pulley - wheel with a grooved rim that carries a line to support movement and change of direction
With this project being the first one of the year in STEM class, I felt very anxious and scared in the beginning that I would fail this project since the difficulties through distance learning. Completing this project through zoom was pretty difficult because my group and I couldn't show each other in person examples that can improve the machine. A positive thing about distance learning is jamming to music off mute while working on the machine. Anyways, as I was assigned to my group with Lindsey and Zachary, we three started bonding with each other very fast and I felt comfortable and thankful to work with them. We all knew that accomplishing this project is not going to be easy but we were determined to finish it and get an exceeding grade out of it.
In the beginning, my group and I decided to start planning and creating our beginning blueprints. Our relationship between us in the group started and ended off successful. None of us wanted to be alpha or leader of the project. None of us were demanding and ordering others to do different parts of the machine. We all simply talked it out and mostly assigned ourselves the steps in the machine by splitting it somewhat evenly by having one member do 5 steps, the other do 6 steps and the last one do 4 steps making it be 15 steps in total. By the end of the first week of planning, my teammates and I had an accomplishable eagle eye of the schematic.
During the 2-3 weeks of constructing, my group and I split into our own workspaces in our house to work on our assigned steps and if anyone of us needed help with creating ideas or improving that step, we would all have each other's backs. To be honest, at the beginning of the construction, we slacked in work ethic because we wanted to more about each other but towards the middle and end of assembling the machine, we were more focused and on task. By the end of constructing the machine, it was pretty different from our beginning blueprint and we started recording our steps to combine it to make an ongoing video with it.
For the last week, we started working on the presentation slides. For this part, one member kind of took leadership in a way throughout the process but we mostly offered to take the role of assigning ourselves slides to create. After creating the slides and getting everything organized, we again assigned ourselves different parts in the slides, mainly the ones that each of us did, we assigned to that creator to understand and present to present on Rube Goldberg night. The presentation went fairly good but through zoom, there were some difficulties considering laggy voices and some cutouts but in the end, it went way better than I expected.
Overall, this project was very adventurous in a way by conquering all the challenges we had throughout the project and a fun learning experience even with covid preventing us from interacting with each other in person. I learned that no matter the difficulties and obstacles you have while completing something that in the end if you put enough determination and effort into it, you will accomplish that task no matter what.