Rube Goldberg Machine

                     What is a Rube Goldberg Machine?

A  Rube Goldberg machine is an over-complicated machine that does a simple task. The machine uses a chain reaction from the previous steps to carry out the simple task. Rube Goldberg was an american Cartoonist and engineer that captured the over complicated word in his drawings and inventions. 

A picture of a Rube Goldberg  Machine

Our Rube Goldberg Machine

Final Product

The final product of our project was bells ringing to represent raindeer on Santa's sleigh, while our theme was Christmas. We had a total of 13 steps from the wedge being pulled, rolling down the ramp, into our pully system, and down the chimney. We had 3 elements of design including pattern(stockings and lights), contrast(Red background), and rhythm(bells). We had 5 energy tranfers including pulley into lever, present into sleigh, sleigh into hot cocoa cup, marshmellow into domiones, and domnies into toy. 

5 simple machines:

Presentation

Blueprints

As you can see our blueprint changed a little bit. We praticaly stuck with our original design but made a few changes. Our first blueprint had 10 steps and our final blueprint has 13 steps. We first had a bike wheel and then we chnaged it to a wood wheel because the bike wheel took up to much space on the board. The end result changed from a ball falling on a switch and turning on lights to a ball knocking over dominoes and ringing bells and then falling into a toy. 

Calculations

Here are the calculations I did to find the physics of the machine.

Reflection

Overall this project was challenging but very fun. I really liked all my group mates and I think that we all got along very well. We did get a little side tracked and didn't really start focusing on the project until the last week or two.

When building our project we had some difficuties with the pulley system. We had to figure our how to make sure it wasn't going to fall off and that it was going to work pretty much every trial so that we wouldn't have to worry about it in our final presentation. We used three different designs to finally figure it out on the last design. We used two tubes, two boxes, and rope. We strung the rope through the bottom of each box and attached a weight to the bottom to make sure the boxes were evened out. We then put hot glue on the front on each tube to make sure the rope wouldnt slide off. 

However, this was probably our only big problem and everything else came pretty easy to build and put together. I think my group did really well on communition and collboartion. We each assigned ourselves to jobs each day so we could get the project done faster. When someone in the group couldn't figure something out, someone else in the group would jump in and help them. We usually figured out the problem and then moved on to the next step that day that we needed to work on. 

There was also some aspects that my group could improve on. Personally, I think I could improve on being focused. At times I wasn't fully focused on the project so that made some of my other group mates unfocused as well. For this project, I had a lot of leadership in the beginning and towards the end by designing the blueprint of the project and getting the presentation done. Another one of my group mates took a huge part in the leadership role towards the end with really staying focused on building the actual machines, doing alot of the calculations, and problem solving on his own when some of us were absent. 

Overall, I think this project was very successful and I'm very happy with our final product and presentation. This project really taught me group work and leadership skills that I can use in future projects.