Rube Goldberg Reflection
In science class we made Rube Goldberg machines during our physics unit. We were looking at mechanical advantage and simple machines. We chose the groups randomly and I wasn’t very excited when I saw my group. I was put in a group with David and John. We started off pretty slow I was doing almost everything during the planning phase. I did not have that great of an idea to begin with (smashing an orange) but luckily Carwai backed us up and helped us think of a better idea. She told us that we should make a smoothie.
It took a long time to build, because our project was especially big. I liked our project because of that. It didn’t have too many simple parts and it had a fun ending. It was pretty complex, but most Rube Goldberg machines are. Our machine started with the press of a button. The button launched a car that knocked down some dominos which pulled a domino off the table that was attached to a dried piece of glue that hit the simple machine that we invented, the John, who dropped a wind up caterpillar down a track which hit a ball setting off a mouse trap that pulled another piece of dried glue out of the way of another car that had a match on top of it to burn through the string that was holding up a brick which pulled some string to tip the buckets of smoothie ingredients into a funnel that went to the blender. Then I turned on the blender, ergo creating a smoothie.
On an average day I would be working on various parts of our project while John helped me. David would be off working on a specific part of the machine, usually the funnels. During this project I defiantly had too come up with a new kind of leadership strategy. During the first stage I knew that David liked to do “his part” and he would defiantly let you know “Your [sic] in [his] zone”. But David and John defiantly did a good job. It was my fault that I immediately took control of this group and didn’t let anybody else even have a chance.
