About Rube Goldberg:
Rube Goldberg was born July 4, 1883 in San Francisco, California.After graduating from UC Berkley with a degree in engineering he moved to New York to draw cartoons. His cartoons soon got popular while he was writing for the Evening Mail
newspaper. While he was making cartoons he came up with the idea of having multiple complex steps to do one simple task, and thus the idea was born
Project Objective:
The reason we did this project is because our awesome teacher Mr. Williams wanted to teach us about simple machines, transfer of energy, and other physics. Although this project was very fun there were some requirements that we had to meet.
Problems, Solutions, and Construction
At the beginning of our project we all came up with several ideas and picked the best one, which was pouring a bowl of cereal and milk. After we decided on the idea we made a sketch on what we wanted it to look like. Then the building began.
The first day was kind of a fiasco, we only nailed a couple of wood blocks in, and cut a board in half. As the second building day came we had already talked about how we were going set our board up. we decided to nail half the board vertical as you can see in the picture.
Rube Goldberg was born July 4, 1883 in San Francisco, California.After graduating from UC Berkley with a degree in engineering he moved to New York to draw cartoons. His cartoons soon got popular while he was writing for the Evening Mail
newspaper. While he was making cartoons he came up with the idea of having multiple complex steps to do one simple task, and thus the idea was born
Project Objective:
The reason we did this project is because our awesome teacher Mr. Williams wanted to teach us about simple machines, transfer of energy, and other physics. Although this project was very fun there were some requirements that we had to meet.
- you must have at least ten steps
- have at least four momentum transfers
- have at least five simple machines (incline plane, lever, pulley, wedge, screw, and wheel and axle)
- make it work at least 75 % of the time
- make a presentation that includes a poster, the project history, a scaled drawing, and calculations of ten steps
Problems, Solutions, and Construction
At the beginning of our project we all came up with several ideas and picked the best one, which was pouring a bowl of cereal and milk. After we decided on the idea we made a sketch on what we wanted it to look like. Then the building began.
The first day was kind of a fiasco, we only nailed a couple of wood blocks in, and cut a board in half. As the second building day came we had already talked about how we were going set our board up. we decided to nail half the board vertical as you can see in the picture.
In order to do this we nailed 3 blocks to the bottom and then nailed the other half of the board up. Once we got the base we started to put the marble track up. At first we had thought that the track would be the easiest part, but we learned that nails would not work well so, we decided to instead put zip ties in. Another problem we faced was the was the screw. The screw was supposed to bring a ball up using a motor (or a wheel and axle), but the rubber band kept flying off. We decided after many tries we gave up on the motor and decided that he ball would roll down the screw instead. This lead to our next problem, because the ball was supposed to be able to hit a mass that was 12 centimeters off the ground. After a lot of thought we came up with the idea of the ball hitting a domino that will hit other dominos going up a stair case. We found this to be one of the hardest steps. The first couple tries it worked flawlessly, but when we tried the next day it did not work one single time. It was a terrible thing to find one of your steps not working two days before our presentation night. After many tweaks, some duck tape, and a sleepless night we got it to work about half the time.
Although our group faced many challenges we stuck together and never fought, or almost never fought. Our callaboration and communication during this project really allowed us to thrive and get a maximum amount of work done. Even though we could still be making tweaks and improvements to our machine and presentation I think we made the most out of our time.
Physics and engineering formulas and concepts
One of the main reasens we did this project is so we can learn how to incorporate physics and engineering into our everyday lives. While we were working on this project we learned about many different formulas and physics concepts. Mechanical advantage, work, force, impulse, kinetic energy, potential energy, and others.
Although our group faced many challenges we stuck together and never fought, or almost never fought. Our callaboration and communication during this project really allowed us to thrive and get a maximum amount of work done. Even though we could still be making tweaks and improvements to our machine and presentation I think we made the most out of our time.
Physics and engineering formulas and concepts
One of the main reasens we did this project is so we can learn how to incorporate physics and engineering into our everyday lives. While we were working on this project we learned about many different formulas and physics concepts. Mechanical advantage, work, force, impulse, kinetic energy, potential energy, and others.
- Work is the force of an object that is pushing on another object and the amount of distance it travels, or work= force x distance. We used this concept in our project when the marble hits the lever. work is calculated in joules.
- Force is the wait of an object and the acceleration of it. The formula is force = mass x acceleration. This concept is used in all of our steps. Force is measured it newtons
- Mechanical advantage is how much a simple machine makes job easer. This was display when the pulley took the nail out of the car track. It had a mechanical advantage of one, there is no mesurment of this All simple machines have a mechanical advantage
- Velocity is the speed in any given direction the formula is velocity = distance over time. In our project all the marbles had velocities. The measurement is meters over seconds
- Potential Energy is the maximum amount of energy that an object can have. The formula is potential energy = mass x gravity x height. In our project everything that was off the ground had potential energy.
- Kinetic Energy is the amount of energy inside. the way it gains energy is by motion. The formula is kinetic energy= 1/2 x mass x velocity squared. All the marbles dominos and other moving objects had kinetic energy a some point.
- Acceleration is the rate that an object moves in an amount of time. The formula is acceleration = mass x velocity. The marbles and the race car were some of the things that had an acceleration in our project. It is measurement by kilograms x meters over seconds.
Reflection:
Good - This was a fun and learning project. I think the best part about it was the hands on learning. For me this is the easest way to learn and the funnest. I learned all the concepts above and thats just the physics. In the engineering part i learned about sawing drilling nailing, and other building skills. Obviously I have learned how to use all the power tools and equipment that goes with the building. I have also learned about the engineering design cycle witch was really helpful for this project, and you can use it for almost all other projects. Another thing this project taught me was to let everybody share the spot light. This means to not be the the center of attention and let everybody share there ideas. Doing this project really showed me the right way to manage my time. This was a really cool and teaching experience and I would recommend this to any teachers or students.
Things we could have done better - A lot of people would usually have this marked as bad reflections, but I think our project did not have anything bad on it just things we could have improved. So improvements to our project. WE did many thing right during our project,
some of the things we could have done better were Time management, our design and on our presentation. At the beginning our group was not the best at building and we often found our conversations off topic. As we worked together more and more we became better at managing our time. When we first designed our project by drawing out it looked nice, but once we had it all built it looked a little sloppy. Due to lack of time we jest had to go with it. Lastly our presentation was kind of shoddy because one of our group members was out. looking back at it now, we still could have communicated better by communicating via texting, FaceTime, Skype, or emails. This would of made it easier on opening night but it was still pretty good
Good - This was a fun and learning project. I think the best part about it was the hands on learning. For me this is the easest way to learn and the funnest. I learned all the concepts above and thats just the physics. In the engineering part i learned about sawing drilling nailing, and other building skills. Obviously I have learned how to use all the power tools and equipment that goes with the building. I have also learned about the engineering design cycle witch was really helpful for this project, and you can use it for almost all other projects. Another thing this project taught me was to let everybody share the spot light. This means to not be the the center of attention and let everybody share there ideas. Doing this project really showed me the right way to manage my time. This was a really cool and teaching experience and I would recommend this to any teachers or students.
Things we could have done better - A lot of people would usually have this marked as bad reflections, but I think our project did not have anything bad on it just things we could have improved. So improvements to our project. WE did many thing right during our project,
some of the things we could have done better were Time management, our design and on our presentation. At the beginning our group was not the best at building and we often found our conversations off topic. As we worked together more and more we became better at managing our time. When we first designed our project by drawing out it looked nice, but once we had it all built it looked a little sloppy. Due to lack of time we jest had to go with it. Lastly our presentation was kind of shoddy because one of our group members was out. looking back at it now, we still could have communicated better by communicating via texting, FaceTime, Skype, or emails. This would of made it easier on opening night but it was still pretty good