Rube Goldberg Refection

BY EMILY FRY 5B

Group: Jade, Clara and Tilly

Project: Making a hole-puncher punch a piece of paper.

Materials we used

To make the Rube Goldberg machine, we obviously need materials. So we collected up A cardboard tube, domino bridge, toy train, toy matchbox car, crochet ball, wooden wedge, dominoes and of course a hole-puncher.

For the weight, to push the wedge, we were thinking about using a bag of ball bearings, but that didn’t work properly, so we used the crochet ball.

Before all this, we were going to use hex-bug tracks and train tracks, but we ended up giving up on that idea.

Our Crochet ball

Our domino bridge, train and tube

Planning

When we were planning, we were thinking about having our rube Goldberg present a marble in a cup. But after a while we ditched the idea because it was to basic.

Then our next idea was to make it charge a computer but then that got too hard and we had to change that.

In the end we had the idea of making it hole-puncher a piece of paper because that was most adaptable with the equipment we had and it seemed more interesting.

Clara helped us with the design because she went into her own time to make the plan up at home.

Simple MachinesWhen we were building we noticed that we didn’t have enough simple machines. We had to have 4 simple machines. We only had a pulley. But in the end we ditched the pulley idea and these are the simple machines that we made

Inclined plane

Wedge

Fulcrum Lever

Wheel and axel

Our wedge ---

---Our lever and inclined plane

Problems & Solutions

Over the past few weeks we have had some problems, like the lever that we had at the start wasn’t the right height, the triangle for the wedge went missing, but we created a new one and it surprisingly worked better.

Another problem was when we had to have a 4th simple machine, which we chose a lever. But that lever wasn’t working properly it kept on getting caught on the cardboard.

When the car didn’t move across the platform and we had to change the platform to an inclined plain which worked well because it added another simple machine to our list

What I have learnt

I have learnt during this process that not everything goes right the first time and heaps of tries always make it right not just 1 or 2.

You get more excited about when something works with heaps of tries rather than just 1.

Simple machines help tasks a lot and without them you may have trouble.

The making of the film

When we were filming, on our second try, it was a success!

When we were filming what we learnt, we had a few fails and had to keep on changing our speech because we thought it needed more.

Also when we were filming, we spoke to fast and you couldn’t really hear it on the camera because we spoke too quietly.