About Rube GoldberG:
Rube Goldberg was born on July 4, 1883. Goldberg was a cartoonist, engineer, sculptor, and news reporter. What made Goldberg famous was his series of popular cartoons, which included complicated machines with several steps, that's overall goal is to achieve one task. Now known as Rube Goldberg machines. For instance, putting toothpaste on a toothbrush or pouring coffee in a mug.
complex rube goldberg machine:
This is not our Rube Goldberg Machine, but in my eyes, a very cool one! Here is a link to behind the scenes of the video below https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qfrmTN0Ly94
project history:
Our original idea for our candy themed Rube Goldberg machine project was to have me catch the gum ball and put it into my mouth, after it had been shot using a catipult. The project's main objective now is trying to accomplish the task of getting a gum ball into a bowl by using a sequence of chain reactions with 5 out of the six simple machines.
Some of the differences between our first concept and our present concept are that initially the screw was going to be right at the beginning of this assignment, following directly after the gum ball left the gum ball machine. Also, instead of using spoons we intended to create a water-wheel like design. Since we were running out of time we had to adjust some ideas and make them easier to construct. Two days before the project was due, we placed 3 inclined planes at the bottom of our project, because we needed 3 more steps and the gum ball would bounce out of the bowl. We had ideas of using multiple funnels for more control in some areas, but also with time constraint, we weren't able to make any. Our project was candy themed, because at the start of making our original schematics we suggested using candy. We wanted to incorporate an actual gum ball machine into the Rube Goldberg machine. It took a lot of revising with trial and error to complete our machine, with the most errors coming from our pulley; which didn't successfully work once during the Rube Goldberg night. In addition, the screw was too thin to fit any actual-sized gum balls, so we had to get weighted metal balls for fishing rods, which seemed to work really well. The first screw we bought was too thick to bend into two loops. Excluding the multiple times we were upset about how much progress we weren't completing, this project was fun and I really enjoyed it. Physics of the Machine:First inclined plane: We found the potential energy.(PE=mgh)
Pulley: We found that the mechanical advantage to be 1 and the potential energy to be 0.0652J. Lever: We found the force of the jawbreaker hitting the right side to be 0.61N. We also calculated the potential energy which was 0.0305J. Tube Screw: We found the mechanical advantage to be 5. Wheel and Axel: We found the force that the spoon puts on the gumball to be 0.031N. |
Reflections:
Since this was our first project in STEM, I learned many new things. The first being, the use of powertools. Before this project my relationship with powertools was very vague, but after using them almost daily for weeks I got to know and understand them and the proper safety while using them quite well. Another thing that I learned, was how to manage my time wisely. In the first week of build days, our group accomplished almost nothing, knowing that we had plenty of time to complete our project. Although we did complete our project on the final build day, it would of saved the group lots of stress and panicking if we were just a little bit more on task, right when the project was assigned. My third and final point of things that I learned has to do with the process of trial and error. As we mentioned in the project history, our design at the beginning was very different from our end product. Probably our biggest struggle came when trying to get the pulley to work consistently. We kept having to adjust the pulley to get the ratio of weight equal on both sides. At times the project was hard, but overall I loved this project!