In this project we created our own experiment for thriving in the cold. I was the leader in my group, so I did a lot of managing and overall writing in this project. It was difficult, with only one of my peers helping me, but we did a good job in the end and I am happy we chose the experiment we did.
Rube Goldberg Project Reflection In this project we were asked to create a rube goldberg that reflected some laws of physics. For ours we wanted it to ring a desk bell, to turn something simple and boring into something fun. We started with background knowledge and labs so that we could understand the background before building.
1. What hands on skills did you learn through working in your group? (construction, problem solving, collaboration, design, time management, etc...) I learned a lot more about power tools then I have before. I learned how to use hot glue guns without burning myself multiple times and I learned how to collaborate with group members who didn’t necessarily do anything. Using powertools was something I wasn’t ever taught and I got to experiment on how to use them and make them work for me. I also learned how to compensate for a group member who didn’t exactly work with me all the time and was on their phone for a lot of the time.
2. What steps were most challenging to make work? (How did you troubleshoot or redesign) The lever!!! This thing would never work with us and was a total pain! I had to guess the angles and and find the projectile distance of the lever and it still was ify. We redesigned the cup that caught it and we eventually got it to work most of the time.
3. Explain the flow of energy throughout the whole rube from start to finish, (did it work all with just the input or did you add more along the way? In what ways is your rube efficient or NOT in transferring energy from one step to another) It is sometimes efficient. Some steps work more often than others depending on if we set it up perfectly or not. It does not work all the time because of some small little tweaks but it has fully worked before and we are hoping it will tonight too.
4. What one physics concept from your analysis is most important to the overall function of your rube. I think that conservation of momentum is the most important cause we have a lot of collision in our rube that keeps it going. Without conservation of momentum this would not work.
5. What was the hardest part of doing this project, how did you persevere? I think the hardest part of this project was making the rube actual work. A lot of it was guess and check which isn’t always the best option but in our case it worked. We kind of strayed from our original idea and made up some steps along the way.