Our task

On Monday, September 9, me and my group were given the task in creating our very own Rube Goldberg machine. We were given about 4-5 weeks to create the machine and get a presentation ready. During these weeks, we learned about velocity, acceleration, force, work, potential energy, kinetic energy, mechanical advantage, simple machines, making blueprinting schematics in scale, and making construction logs. We were required at least 10 steps, 5 simple machines, 4 energy transfers, and 3 elements of design. We decided to pick our theme as someone failing to make a Rube Goldberg machine.

10 steps

1.Ball rolls down ramp

2.Ball hits Lego man

3.Hanging man attached to rope and pulls nail out of wood

4. falls down and hits a metal ball

5.Ball rolls down and goes through tube and hits dominoes

6. Domino's roll down and hit another ball

7.Ball rolls down tube

8.Ball comes down tube and hits weight

9.The weights hit another weight

10.Weights pull the tarp

5 Simple machines

1. screw: We have a screw as one of our simple machines multiple times, the 3rd step and the 10th step?

2. pulley: We have a pulley on our 2nd step of our project when the man falls of the wood pulling the nail out of the wood

3. incline plane: We have a incline plane in our first step when the ball is rolled down the wood, another part is when the marble also rolls down the wood twice

4. lever:

5. Wheel and axle: We have a wheel and axle with the wheel that we have on the second part making the pully work

4 energy transfers

1. Tennis ball hits person

2. Person pulls on pullet, which results in the hammer hitting the ball

3. Ball hits dominoes, causes toppling, which hits another ball down the corkscrew

4. The ball comes out of the corkscrew and hits the pendulum, which transfers it's energy into the dumbbell.

3 Elements of design

1. We blacked out our entire board to make the actual build stand out.

2. Our theme of the board

3. Steps that have physical representations

Blueprints

At the start of this project we had to make a blueprint of what we wanted our machine to look like. Along the course of the building process we made some changes to the build and blueprint.

Some of the changes that we made throughout the course of the building are

• we added a pulley at the top of the box

• we made a cone for the ball to roll down

• we made a screw

• we made a weight for the ball to hit

• made the weight to hit a tarp and fall over

Starting blueprint Final blueprint

Major physics in this machine

Simple Machine - A basic device that makes an objective easier. There are 6 types: lever, wedge, screw, wheel and axle, pulley, and inclined plane.

Example - To lower the star onto the tree, a marble had to fall into a cup on a pulley.

Velocity: The rate at which something travels. This is calculated by distance by time. The unit was meters per second (m/s)

Acceleration (a) - The rate at which something changes velocity. This is calculated by dividing velocity by time. The unit is meters per second squared (m/s^2).

Example - When the ball gets rolled down ramp

Acceleration due to Gravity (g) - The rate at which something changes velocity due to gravity. This value is always 9.8m/s^2.

Example - Every object in the machine that would free fall would accelerate at 9.8m/s^2.

Force (F) - The push or pull on an object. This is calculated by multiplying mass by acceleration. The unit is newtons (N).

Example - The ball hits the dominoes which causes the dominoes to topple over

Energy Transfer - The transition from one type of energy to another.

Example - when the hammer begins to fall down and it turns from Potentail energy to Kinetic energy

Potential Energy (PE) - The amount of energy in an object at rest. This is calculated by multiplying mass, height, and acceleration. The unit is joules (J).

Example - When the hammer is being held by the nail ready to fall over

Kinetic Energy (KE) - The amount of energy in an object in motion. This is calculated by multiplying half of the mass to the velocity squared (1/2mv^2). The unit is joules (J).

Example - When the hammer is falling down to hit the metal ball.

Mechanical Advantage - There are two types of mechanical advantage: ideal and real. Ideal is how much further you push using a tool, and real is how much easier (less Force) a tool makes something. This has no unit since it's a ratio.

Example - The tiled lever had an ideal mechanical advantage of 2.923.

Construction log

Day 1: We started by painting our board black and adding a ramp onto the top right of the board.

Day 2: We cut many wood pieces and created the box in the top middle of the board. We also started working on our pulley.

Day 3: We completed the pulley and made sure everything on the board works. Once we did that we revised some of the blueprints and constructed the hammer for our next step.

Day 4: We made the screw and we made a funnel out of cardboard and paper.

Day 5: We decided to make the wood pieces for the ball to roll down. We started to get the wood to make the ramp. Next, we cut the pieces up and we had all of the pieces t o make our ramp for the ball to roll down.

Day 6: We attached the wood onto the board with the dominoes, and ended up moving pieces around so our rube Goldberg worked cohesively each run.

Day 7: We attached the screw into the wood piece and made it possible for the ball to move all the way through the screw without getting stuck.

Day 8: We made a weighted pendulum and put a screw and a small wood piece into the board to make the pendulum swing whenever the ball hit it.

Day 9: We cut the curtain and made it so it was able to fall off of the PVC pipe with a weight. We ended up drilling in the small wood piece to hold the weight up before it falls.

Day 10: We finalized all our pieces, and filmed our project going through every single step. We also made sure that our project displayed everything we wanted it to look like.

Reflection

I was going into this year not knowing what to expect out of the STEM class this year. I believe this project was a great start to my STEM experience because it showed me what the real STEM is like and how it is like to build and work with other people.

Some of the things that I believe that I did good on in this project was, helping to build the project, helping make the blueprints and help cut all of the pieces to make the machine itself. Helping to make this project was crucial part to this build because without all effort that my group put into actually building this machine, the machine would not be as good as it is now. Another crucial part in making the Rube Goldberg Machine that I helped a lot on was helping to make the blueprint. Making the blueprint was very hard and required a lot of concentration because this was the start of making the machine function and operational. This part was a very difficult part in the building posses but with all of our group members we were able to get the job done. The next part that I helped a lot on was the cutting of all the pieces. This part of the building process was not very difficult but it was very time consuming because I had to know the right measurements and were to cut. This process in my opinion was the most time consuming in the whole project and creation of our machine.

Another part or our Rube Goldberg Machine was creating the video for our project. One of my group members created the video since he was a really good video editor. While that group member was creating the video the rest of us were creating the notes about our machine as well as the presentation that we were going to do on Rube Goldberg night. This part was fairly easy since we had everything put together it was just a matter of condensing all of our work into a 5-10 min presentation. Although this was fairly easy, this part did also take a very long time to do since we had to make sure the presentation was close to perfect.