Rube Goldberg machines are machines that over-complicate a simple task and add a lot of excess steps. They got their name from a cartoonist who drew pictures of these machines. In our class each group was each given 5 weeks to create their project. My group consisted of Aiden Pester, Adam Rosenbaum, Joell Vaca, and myself. The first week we brainstormed ideas and blueprinted. We ended up choosing flipping a pancake into the air to be our final simple task. The 2nd through 4th weeks we built the actual machines. In the first week of building was slow because we were finding all our resources and scaling the blueprint to the board. The 2nd build week we got quite a bit of drilling and cutting done, and on the 3rd build week we put in final essential components such as the water wheel and the pulley systems. The final week was dedicated to scripting our presentation and calculating different speeds, velocities, and potential and kinetic energies.
This is our final project:
This is our final project:
In the process I bonded with some people I hadn't known before and rekindled an old friendship. We gained experience with power tools such as table saws and drills and learned many new measurments in physics and how to calculate them. All in all this project was an amazing experience that I felt we did good on.