This project didn’t turn out as I imagined, nor as good as I hoped, but it’s still very good! It looks impressive and even works unintentionally, which is the hallmark of a Rube Goldberg machine. It deviated a lot from my original plan, but it still looks amazing! I mostly completed the project within the time limit (Mr. Michie kept forgetting the lightbulb to light my prism), is mostly environmentally friendly, and can be assembled any time as long as the parts still are there! Also, I can just say that I am proud of my improvising skill 🙂

How It Works:

The domino tower falls, starting from the left to the right, and it leads to pushing the wooden stick connected to a ruler under a cardboard piece with a marble and two weights on it. After the wooden stick is pushed off, the ruler is used as a seesaw and as one side goes down, the other goes up and tilts the cardboard piece, rolling the marble down a cardboard tube that’s propped against the box. The marble rolls down the tube and knocks over another wooden stick with a weight on top to ensure it falls backward, onto the button that powers the lightbulb, which shines into the prism!

Problems and Solutions – Reflecting:

  • During the planning stage of the project, a day before I started building, I drew the rough draft of the original machine that utilized all the materials we had in the Design Lab. Actually, I had to redraw the first draft several times because the ideas in my head didn’t translate well onto paper, and because I had to reconsider the space of the machine first.
  • Speaking of space, I knew I couldn’t take up too much space for the machine because there were, since there were other people working. The original design featured several stools and the space between two tables, but I eventually shortened it with the help of a lightbulb box!
  • Another problem was that my machine required the work of gravity to help the marbles move along, so I needed elevation. This was a problem because there weren’t any books available in the Design Center, and all the boxes were baskets provided for each student’s projects. I also utilized the edge of the table to help, which in hindsight was a good idea because when the marble and the stick drops off, it would destabilize the entire machine and would roll onto the carpet.
  • After several failed tries and three classes of trying to figure out how to make the first stage of my original plan work, I eventually gave up on it. Some of the fabric was too slippery and required more weight on top to prevent it from falling straight away, even though I ditched the idea of using dominos to push the weights off because the dominos were too light in comparison to said weight. Some of the fabrics slid off easily with minimal weight, but wouldn’t sync with the falling of the previous bolt. I tried taping the wooden sticks to the fabric itself as well as to each other so it would fall consecutively, but the wooden sticks proved too stiff, and only 3 out of 5 trials it worked. Out of those 3 times,  I wasn’t satisfied with how it looked.
  • From there, I had to take some time to think about how to modify my original design to achieve the same result. In the end, I just went with dominos, and I think that was a good idea. While it did prove to be a bit precarious to set up, it looked really impressive and accomplished the smaller goal (pushing the wooden bar off the table to set the second stage in motion) easily once I adjusted the position of the last domino’s distance between the stick.
  • For the second stage, the elevation part, I originally didn’t have a base. After testing it out a few times, it turned out to be a bad idea, because it rolled all over the place instead of the tube where I wanted it to go. Using cardboard, I constructed sort of a track to guide the marble to the tube.
  • Once the marble could roll down the tube, the wooden stick that was supposed to fall backward did not. Because the tube led to the ground, and I think the momentum was a bit too much, the base gave away and fell forward instead. Mr. Michie suggested I raise the spot where the marble hit so the bottom would be more stable, but it still wasn’t consistent. I eventually solved it by connecting a wooden slab to the base to both steady the bottom and raise the colliding point, as well as adding a metal weight to the top to ensure it fell backward.
  • In the end, we ran out of time and the button switch we found wasn’t big enough in radius for the wooden stick to hit it consistently, and the force wasn’t enough to press the button, but I still got some great videos of the first two stages, which is what matters!