Rube Goldberg Machine
A Rube Goldberg machine is a machine with a series of events that is designed to perform a task in an overly complicated way. Rube Goldberg was an American cartoonist most popular in the 1910's. He made the first machine, so now we call these types of instruments "Rube Goldberg machines."
Rube Goldberg Export 2.mp4My group consisted of Anthony, Andrew, Spencer, and I. Our theme was constructing a Rube Goldberg machine. Our theme of our machine was building a Rube Goldberg machine. Over the course of four-five weeks, we brainstormed, blueprinted, built, and present our machine. We included a hammer and curtain to show our theme had to do with building and presenting. Our machine consists of eleven steps, five simple machines, and four energy transfers. To the right, I have a video showing our machine working, and below I included our construction log that was used during our ten building days that we worked on our project.
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.
Blueprints:
Below is our original blueprint and final blueprint. The original blueprint is what we thought our machine was going to look like. We planned our machine to have different steps, and have our steps laid out on the board differently. Once we got to our fourth step, we realized that our machine wouldn't work cohesively if we continued to build our machine like this.
Our final blueprint is our final machine, and how it looked completed. We actually ended up adding different steps. Additionally, we changed many steps, and even got rid of one of our steps completely. We removed the saw, and changed our curtain to perform differently. We also added a cone funnel to help the marbles roll down the ramps with ease.
Simple Machines:
My group and I included these simple machines:
-Screw (We have a screw in our machine, where a ball rolls down and through the screw.)
-Lever (When our dominoes fell, it created a lever.)
-Pulley (We had a pulley included to make a hammer fall.)
-Incline Plane (We included multiple incline planes for all of our ramps.)
-Wheel and Axle (Our wheel and axle was demonstrated in the final step when our curtain falls.)
Calculations
-velocity = change of distance/change of time
-acceleration = change of velocity/change of time
-force = (mass)(acceleration)
-work = (force)(distance)
Velocity
Velocity is demonstrated when the ball rolls down the ramp at .66m/s and hits a man at a kinetic energy of 0.01J. Velocity is also demonstrated when then the marble comes out of the spiral at .9m/s
Acceleration
Acceleration is demonstrated when the dominoes hits a metal ball with 0.03n and the ball rolls down the screw.
Force
Force is demonstrated when the nail gets pulled out of the wood after .75 newtons of force is pulled on it. It is also shown after the man falls down, and the rope gets pulled down at a force of 1.5N. Forcce is also shown when the marble hits the pendulum with .7n of force.
Work
Work is demonstrated when the metal ball goes through the cone and hits dominoes and they start toppling.
Potential Energy
Potential Energy is demonstrated when the hammer falls down and hits the metal ball which has a potential energy of 11J. Also, the dumbbell has .6J of PE.
Kinetic Energy
Kinetic Energy is demonstrated when the pendulum swings and hits a one pound dumbbell with .06J of kinetic energy.
Reflection:
During this project I was working with a whole group of unfamiliar faces. I had seen one of my group members around at my previous middle school, but my other new group members were people I had never met. It was a little nerve racking to have to work for around six weeks with a team that you had no previous interactions with. After a few weeks into our project, I found that we all got along very well. In my opinion, I did a great job at communicating with my group members. If I felt like we were not getting enough work completed, or that our tasks were not fair, I made sure to politely state the issue I was having. We found out ways to resolve all our conflicts fairly easy, and I believe that my ability to communicate impacted that. I also think I did a good job at being a conscientious learner. Each day my group, and myself individually set a plan for what we were going to try and complete. This method helped us get our work done efficiently and we were able to complete our project before the due date. This gave us ample time to get the rest of the assignments we needed to complete done. I believe that in the next project I should try to improve on my critical thinking, and collaboration. Although my group and I worked very hard to complete things, often times we would split up and work independently. I think that I could also try to improve on my critical thinking by always trying to stay on task and being as efficient as possible with my work. I don´t believe that I was extremely off task, or didn´t complete my work well during this project, but I think I could try to do a better job of making sure all of my work is thoroughly completed, with my best effort.