Rube Golberg
On Friday we started a big project on Rube Golberg machines. An RB machine is a machine that is very complicated but it only does simple things like putting a piece of rubbish in the bin as we did on Friday, our RB Machine has a successful zip-line, a tunnel and down wood slope that a car goes down and hits the marble then goes through the tunnel and bumps into the carriage that nocks in the piece of paper into the bin. This project was really frustrating because we couldn’t find a carriage light enough because the zip line was made from string and it was very flimsy.[ PS do not attempt this project if you don’t have passions.] We had 25 minutes to plan then we started to build, everyone was under pressure because we only had 2 hours to design, test, re-design, re-test and so on. I learnt a lot on Friday and cant wait to do this again next week.
Today was our first lesson on designing our official Rube Goldberg machine. Our plan is to turn a page in a book to do so we need a series of contraptions to turn the page or it won’t be a Rube Goldberg machine. Our plan is to make a marble go down an inclined plane off a ledge and into a pulley the wait of the marble will make the pulley fall down onto the see saw that falls down by the weight and hits a switch that turns on a fan and its job is turn a page in a book.
On Tuesday was our second session doing our designs for the Rube Goldberg machine. This session was mostly about fine lining the drawing and organising who is going to bring certain things in. the design looks a lot neater and tidy when you rube off all the grey led and just have the pen.
On Friday we started building our Rube Goldberg machine, it was really fun building all the different parts of the machine we started by building the pulley that works very well and only doesn’t work if we put too much of a heavy marble inside it. Our other contraption is the see-saw which is made out of Lego but it is a bit fragile and unstable so I built a stand for it. I think we had a pretty successful session.
On Tuesday we continued building the separate parts of our Rube Goldberg machine. Our main focus was to be able to start piecing them together by the end of the session, we also modified a few parts like the pulley and the see-saw, for example the pulley we made the bit that turns the string into a metal one and we made the see-saw lower and that’s about it but here is a some photos
today we were continuing building and joining the separate parts together and we have finished the turning and fan part of it so all we have to do is the start and make it look cool and extend it and that’s what we were trying to do today but we didn’t succeed in doing so. it worked only in its separate parts but we take that as a win we got rid of the see-saw because it was just a waist of space and we did not need it. here’s a photo of what we have been doing.
Today we finished the building phase and now we are testing to see if it works but its only been a success 1s and we didn’t get it on video because it was only our first time we tested it which I was really annoyed about. Before we started our design session the teachers spoke to us about how this is our last we on our Rube Goldberg project so what we needed to complete this week is modifying our designs, having it working constantly we also need a video showing our journey that we have had during this project. When we were building today we notice that the starting marble rolls off the blocks so we built barriers and directors so that it would always go where we wanted it to, now the part was the two cut in half toilet rolls so what we did was we cut them in half and the we sticky taped one half onto the high table and then it drops onto the other and goes another way which then takes the marble to the pulley which then drops slowly onto the connects fan and turns a page in a book and YAY!!!! If that happens it works.
Today was all about modifying and testing and re testing. Today we were mostly focusing on making our machine more compact and more complicated by doing that we also made it a lot more portable, we also started getting footage for our Rube Goldberg video but mostly it was just getting it to work consistently and only not work some times. I have nearly finished my second design of the machine which consists of the simple machines, materials, the method and the sketch of what it would look like.
Today was our last session on our Rube Goldberg machines which is really sad. Throughout the unit I learnt that it takes a lot of passions and that the machine wont always work the first time and that sometimes it doesn’t even work at all. We made a video about our experience of the unit and we have been given time until Wednesday next but my group doesn’t need it because I finished the video today YAY. Guess what our RB machine works 9/10 times how good is that! My group and I tweaked the machine to make it more reliable. I am really disappointed this session Is over and I wonder what we will be doing in Term 3.
on Tuesday we had a Rube Goldberg expo and the year 4s came to have a look at our machines our parents also got the chance to come to and look to It was really exiting setting it up and showing lots of kids and the journey has been really fun and its really sad that its done. ☹☹