Who is Rube Goldberg and what is a Rube Goldberg Machine?
Rube Goldberg was a famous cartoonist, sculptor, author, engineer, and inventor. He lived from 1883 to 1970, and during his life accomplished a lot in his fields. He was best known for the cartoons he created of complicated machines doing very simple things. These cartoons are what started the creation of Rube Goldberg Machines in the first place; and why the machine is named after Rube Goldberg. What is a rube Goldberg machine you may ask? A rube Goldberg machine is a machine that completes a simple task in the most complicated way possible. You will commonly see dominoes hitting into each other involved in these machines. As well as ramps (inclined planes), and any type of ball rolling down them.
Our machine:
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Rube Goldberg was a famous cartoonist, sculptor, author, engineer, and inventor. He lived from 1883 to 1970, and during his life accomplished a lot in his fields. He was best known for the cartoons he created of complicated machines doing very simple things. These cartoons are what started the creation of Rube Goldberg Machines in the first place; and why the machine is named after Rube Goldberg. What is a rube Goldberg machine you may ask? A rube Goldberg machine is a machine that completes a simple task in the most complicated way possible. You will commonly see dominoes hitting into each other involved in these machines. As well as ramps (inclined planes), and any type of ball rolling down them.
Our machine:
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This is what my groups Rube Goldberg Machine looks like working correctly. Our goal of the machine was to shoot a Nerf gun by pulling on it with a string attached to a car, we accomplished this in ten steps.
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Steps:
Step 1: Golf Ball bounces down Set of two Inclined Planes.
Mechanical Advantage = 2.4
Step 2: Golf Ball Rolls down aluminum screw.
Mechanical Advantage = 3.24
Step 3: Golf Ball Rolls down second, larger inclined plane.
Mechanical Advantage = 2.6
Step 4: Golf Ball rolls into Cup that is connected to Pulley System.
Mechanical Advantage = 1
Step 5: Pulley Raises lever with car balancing on it.
Mechanical Advantage = 1.24
Step 6: Raised Lever lets car overcome wedge and roll down Inclined Plane.
Mechanical Advantage = 4.7
Step 7: Car Hits Rolled up Sign.
Force Required to make Sign fall = 1.7 Newtons.
Step 8: Car attached to Nerf gun falls off table and pulls with enough force to shoot Nerf gun.
For required to shoot gun = 5 Newtons
Step 9: Rolled up Sign falls onto Lever forcing other side upwards.
Mechanical Advantage = 1.7
Step 10: Confetti in cup on opposite side of lever flies into the air.
Potential and Kinetic Energy of Confetti = 0.00235 Joules.
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More about machine: Some things you may want to consider about this machine is that every part was recycled somehow. The wood pieces were all recycled from previous classes. Our screw was recycled from trash found on campus. And all props used in the machine were recycled from our homes.
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What I learned: From the rube Goldberg project i have learned a lot. From the eleven days that my group had worked on the machine, we only made significant progress in the last five. This caused a lot of stress leading up to our presentation. From it I have learned that time management is a crucial part of long term projects, especially when working in groups. Another thing that I have learned about working in groups is communicating. While working in my group one thing that caused a lack of progress was poor communication. Sometimes while brainstorming we would think out loud and confuse our other group members witch led to extra time put into trying to understand each others ideas. This could have been easily avoided by presenting our ideas to each other with all information laid out and easy to understand. Hopefully in the future my group will improve our time management. Two thing that I personally need to work on are focus and involvement. This is because I found myself spacing out and not helping my group on multiple occasions which left me confused after things were adjusted. On the other hand I feel like my group did very well at organizing time to make up for lost time. In total I estimate that my group spent an extras two hours inside at lunch working. This is how we were able to finish in time. I hope that my futures groups will continue to use lunchtime to complete work.
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Work Log:
Day 1: We started designing our project. Our first physical building step was cutting our main board of wood in half. We then started shaping pieces of wood to hold the two pieces together.
Day 2: We started using power tools and screws to attach our boards together. Once they were together we proceeded to nail in our first step which was our first set of two inclined planes.
Day 3: We organized all of the supplies we brought from home and began brainstorming places for them to be used.
Day 4: We went outside to scavenge for aluminum cans in trash cans around campus. when we returned to the classroom we began cutting the cans to construct our screw step of the project.
Day 5:We slowly started putting together the screw, we also started working on constructing a pulley which was designed to hit a lever.
Days 6-8: We continue trying to construct a pulley that will consistently hit a lever.We experiment with different methods of using the pulley. We eventually give up on it and brainstorm new ideas for the pulley system.
Day 9: We come up with a final plan for our pulley and put it into action. We decided to have our ball roll down an inclined plane, go down a pulley which would then pull a lever causing a car to roll down and pull the trigger of our Nerf gun which was our final step.
Day 10: But we were not finished yet we were still missing two steps that we had to incorporate into our machine somewhere. So we brainstormed two new steps that would complete our machine.
Day 11: We put together our last two steps which were adding the piece of paper that gets knocked by our car onto a lever filled with confetti. After it was together we began our calculations and schematics work.
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Terms:
Inclined Plane: A flat surface that is angled.
Screw: an inclined plane that goes around in a circle.
Pulley: A wheel on an axle that a rope goes through.
Lever: A bar or plank on a fixed point called a fulcrum.
Wedge: Something that holds something else in place, or something that is used to split something else apart.
Newton: The standard unit measurement for force.
Joule: The standard unit measurement for energy.
Potential Energy: Energy an object has stored because of its position.
Kinetic Energy: Energy an object has due to motion. The reason why our Kinetic and Potential energy is the same is because all of its potential energy theoretically should turn to kinetic energy.
Mechanical Advantage: How much easier a machine makes something.
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Steps:
Step 1: Golf Ball bounces down Set of two Inclined Planes.
Mechanical Advantage = 2.4
Step 2: Golf Ball Rolls down aluminum screw.
Mechanical Advantage = 3.24
Step 3: Golf Ball Rolls down second, larger inclined plane.
Mechanical Advantage = 2.6
Step 4: Golf Ball rolls into Cup that is connected to Pulley System.
Mechanical Advantage = 1
Step 5: Pulley Raises lever with car balancing on it.
Mechanical Advantage = 1.24
Step 6: Raised Lever lets car overcome wedge and roll down Inclined Plane.
Mechanical Advantage = 4.7
Step 7: Car Hits Rolled up Sign.
Force Required to make Sign fall = 1.7 Newtons.
Step 8: Car attached to Nerf gun falls off table and pulls with enough force to shoot Nerf gun.
For required to shoot gun = 5 Newtons
Step 9: Rolled up Sign falls onto Lever forcing other side upwards.
Mechanical Advantage = 1.7
Step 10: Confetti in cup on opposite side of lever flies into the air.
Potential and Kinetic Energy of Confetti = 0.00235 Joules.
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More about machine: Some things you may want to consider about this machine is that every part was recycled somehow. The wood pieces were all recycled from previous classes. Our screw was recycled from trash found on campus. And all props used in the machine were recycled from our homes.
_____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
What I learned: From the rube Goldberg project i have learned a lot. From the eleven days that my group had worked on the machine, we only made significant progress in the last five. This caused a lot of stress leading up to our presentation. From it I have learned that time management is a crucial part of long term projects, especially when working in groups. Another thing that I have learned about working in groups is communicating. While working in my group one thing that caused a lack of progress was poor communication. Sometimes while brainstorming we would think out loud and confuse our other group members witch led to extra time put into trying to understand each others ideas. This could have been easily avoided by presenting our ideas to each other with all information laid out and easy to understand. Hopefully in the future my group will improve our time management. Two thing that I personally need to work on are focus and involvement. This is because I found myself spacing out and not helping my group on multiple occasions which left me confused after things were adjusted. On the other hand I feel like my group did very well at organizing time to make up for lost time. In total I estimate that my group spent an extras two hours inside at lunch working. This is how we were able to finish in time. I hope that my futures groups will continue to use lunchtime to complete work.
_____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Work Log:
Day 1: We started designing our project. Our first physical building step was cutting our main board of wood in half. We then started shaping pieces of wood to hold the two pieces together.
Day 2: We started using power tools and screws to attach our boards together. Once they were together we proceeded to nail in our first step which was our first set of two inclined planes.
Day 3: We organized all of the supplies we brought from home and began brainstorming places for them to be used.
Day 4: We went outside to scavenge for aluminum cans in trash cans around campus. when we returned to the classroom we began cutting the cans to construct our screw step of the project.
Day 5:We slowly started putting together the screw, we also started working on constructing a pulley which was designed to hit a lever.
Days 6-8: We continue trying to construct a pulley that will consistently hit a lever.We experiment with different methods of using the pulley. We eventually give up on it and brainstorm new ideas for the pulley system.
Day 9: We come up with a final plan for our pulley and put it into action. We decided to have our ball roll down an inclined plane, go down a pulley which would then pull a lever causing a car to roll down and pull the trigger of our Nerf gun which was our final step.
Day 10: But we were not finished yet we were still missing two steps that we had to incorporate into our machine somewhere. So we brainstormed two new steps that would complete our machine.
Day 11: We put together our last two steps which were adding the piece of paper that gets knocked by our car onto a lever filled with confetti. After it was together we began our calculations and schematics work.
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Terms:
Inclined Plane: A flat surface that is angled.
Screw: an inclined plane that goes around in a circle.
Pulley: A wheel on an axle that a rope goes through.
Lever: A bar or plank on a fixed point called a fulcrum.
Wedge: Something that holds something else in place, or something that is used to split something else apart.
Newton: The standard unit measurement for force.
Joule: The standard unit measurement for energy.
Potential Energy: Energy an object has stored because of its position.
Kinetic Energy: Energy an object has due to motion. The reason why our Kinetic and Potential energy is the same is because all of its potential energy theoretically should turn to kinetic energy.
Mechanical Advantage: How much easier a machine makes something.
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