This is the finished product of our Rube Goldberg machine. As you can see, it is 49ers colors in the spirit of Marin County and our Niners. This project was done by Eryk Lewandowski, Tim Madison and me. This project was based on making simple machines throughout a great big project to finish a simple task. These tasks include: putting coins into a piggy bank, pouring cereal into a bowl, hitting an Easy button, or ringing a bell. It was definitely a hard task to complete in 10 days. We spent about 20% of our time designing the project, 75% of the time building the project, and about 5% of our time making the presentation. We were given a 4ft x 4ft piece of wood to start. We then created the 3-dimensional structure. We didn't start from the beginning of the project, instead we started our building process at The Plinko Board (Step 9). This was a very time consuming piece that took us three days to finally finish the board. We personally would like to thank Bob Barker for the Plinko Board. We then constructed the next ten steps in order and finished the project one day ahead of schedule. Although we finished early, we had some difficulties with the project such as: the coins would fall prematurely into the piggy bank, the car that was designed to hit a weight would miss the weight, and the marbles would fall down the Plinko Board prematurely. These were all minor tweaks that needed to be made but could have been major setbacks that we needed to watch for.
The Rube Goldberg Project
- Major Physics Concepts:
- MECHANICAL ADVANTAGE: the ratio of the force produced by a machine to the force applied to it, used in assessing the performance of a machine; we used mechanical advantage in our inclined planes
- FORCE: strength or energy as an attribute of physical action or movement; we used force on all the balls and marbles
- WORK: activity involving mental or physical effort done in order to achieve a purpose or result; we used work in our pulley systems and Plinko Board
- POTENTIAL ENERGY: the energy possessed by a body by virtue of its position relative to others, stresses within itself, electric charge, and other factors
- KINETIC ENERGY: energy that a body possesses by virtue of being in motion
- MOMENTUM: the quantity of motion of a moving body, measured as a product of its mass and velocity
- IMPULSE: the product of the average force multiplied by the time it is exerted
I think the two peaks of the project for me were: I learned collaboration is the most important element in building a project and that how down I was after my Grandpa died on the first day of school, my friends and classmates (especially in S.T.E.M.) didn't know it but, they cheered me up. I realized that no matter how down you are, having a strong, fun, and big community in school is really important.
The community I had in school was great because they cheered me up. They did whatever it took to take my mind off of my Grandpa dying and my Grandma suffering from brain cancer. When your family is down and at a low point in their life, you can't turn to them for help because they are just as sad you and they help of their own. So next time I don't want to go to school, I will think about the community that I have and maybe one of them will be depressed and I have to cheer them up. That's what I learned about myself.
Two pits or negatives that we had in our group were time management and communication. First off we, as mentioned, started with our Plinko Board at step 9. That piece alone, took about 20% of the time to complete. That left us scrambling to finish the rest of the building and make the presentation. This leads me to my next point that communication is vital because you can't do a whole project without talking to the other people in your group. We didn't have the best communication to start the project but, it got better towards the end when we really needed to finish the project. Thank you for visiting the site and come back anytime.