We learned a lot from our Rube Goldberg machine , it was a great first project in my first year in the stem program at San Marin. We were able to design and builds our project and learned how to calculate the physics behind each step. By the end I was able to find the mechanical advantage of the ramps, the acceleration of the balls on the ramps, the Kinetic energy pf the ball hitting another ball and more! We tried to keep the theme breakfast throughout our whole project by making bacon ramps, doughnut screws and pouring cheerios into a bowl. Our goal was to put a piece of toast into a toaster.
We had a total of 9 build days and 3 days to work on calculations and decorations. On our first day we gathered materials and started to build our first ramp. By the middle of our build days we had the screw, 2 ramps and the pulley system in place and were working on the lever. On the last day we had everything in place and were making final adjustments to our machine. Our first blue print resembles our final product of our machine fairly well there was just some scaling differences you can see this below.
|
Over the course of this project we learned how to calculate the force (The push or pull on an object) an object has on another object, like the knife that sticks out of the bacon ramp. We learned how to calculate 2 types of mechanical advantage (How much easier something is) they are ideal and real mechanical advantage we calculated this in the pulley and the ramps. I also learned how to find the momentum(how much an object wants to keep moving) on a moving object, there is momentum on the marble as it goes down the funnel. I also learned that potential energy and kinetic are equal to each other, there is potential energy when the ball is rested on the knife..
Overall I thought that this project went very well, my group and I seemed to work very well with each other once we got to know each other. I learned that I have improved my leadership skills and I took a big role in completing the project. Another one of my peaks is my work ethic, I was working almost every second I had time too. But I did have pits I wasn't the best person with empathy I helped sometimes with my groups personal problems. But we had group problems like agreeing on what we need to do next but that was and easy fix. I plan to start to care about what problems my group is having and to try to agree with what my group members want. All in all I learned a lot from doing this project and it was a great project to start the year off with.