In this project, we were required to have 5 simple machines, 4 energy transfers, and 10 steps. We had about a month to do this before we had to display and present our projects to the public on Rube Goldberg Night which was on October 1, 2014. The 5 simple machines we used are inclined plane, pulley, lever, screw, and wedge.
My group consisted of Annabel Milliner, Kate Mayfield, Sterling Reed, and, of course, myself. Now I'll tell you about the project. The first thing we did was drill the two boards together. Then we had to paint the project. This took us about a week, so we were behind the other groups, who had jumped straight into the engineering part of the project. Then we had to make the peg board. This also took us about a week, so we only had about two more weeks to finish our project. Then we came across a major problem. We didn't have enough room to fit our original plan onto the board. So we had to make a new one. It was mainly improv, because we went straight into it and worked from the latest thing added to our project. In the two weeks that we had left, we managed to make a pulley to lift a fence so our main marble could start its journey. It would go down a class 1 lever, onto another inclined plane, land on a screw, where it would fall down the middle in the hole we made, go onto another inclined plane with popsicle sticks sticking out to slow it down, hit a bigger marble, go down another inclined plane, hitting a basket, which is connected to a pulley system which would let the flag fall onto the moon using a wedge. Here is a picture of our final plan.
Now I am going to tell you the physics of our project. The first thing we had to figure out was the mechanical advantage of our inclined planes. The formula to find this out goes as follows: mechanical advantage of an inclined plane equals the length of the plane divided by the height of the plane. The next mechanical advantage we had to find were the ones of the pulleys. This was pretty easy because the mechanical advantage of a pulley is just the amount of times the string passes through the pulley. The next is the lever. The equation is: mechanical advantage equals the length of the effort bar divided by the length of the resistance arm. The next is our screw. The equation is: mechanical advantage equals the diameter of the screw divided by the length of the object in the screw has to go around. The last was our wedge. The equation is: mechanical advantage equals the side length divided by the thickness of the wedge.
Reflection
During our project, I thought we did a very good job working together and making a great project. We listened to each other's opinions and came up with some great ideas for the project. We also handled out the tasks very well, so everyone had something to do productively. Everyone contributed to the project in their own way. What we could have done better was managing our time. The first two weeks were spent painting and building the peg board.
During our project, I thought we did a very good job working together and making a great project. We listened to each other's opinions and came up with some great ideas for the project. We also handled out the tasks very well, so everyone had something to do productively. Everyone contributed to the project in their own way. What we could have done better was managing our time. The first two weeks were spent painting and building the peg board.