For week seven of the student blogging challenge we could write about anything we wanted to. I decided to write about something that excites me, creating things! I am going to talk about how I built my gum ball machine.

This was the first one I made it was going to be a gum ball machine but I did not have any gum balls so it turned out to be a M and M machine. After I figured out what I was going to build I lay on the floor and stared at a cardboard box and thought about how it would work. I had to think to myself how to make it only work with money and also how to have only one M and M come out at a time. After I figured it out I started putting it together. I tested my machine along the way to make sure that it worked and I tweaked little things until I was almost done. I had finished the part where you put the money in M and M comes out and all I had to do was make the part where the M and M’s stay. I started building but when I tried it out my idea did not work because the peanut M and M’s were different sizes. I thought more about a better way to hold the M and M’s and then I got an idea. I started building again and it work pretty well but I still had to tweak it a little.

A few months later I wanted to try to improve my M and M machine. The first thing that I did was buy some gum balls, they were much easier to work with because they were all the same size. I made the first part the same because I was happy with the way it worked but the part that holds the gum balls I wanted to change. I thought about what would work best then I built it. It did not work that well and it got jammed again so I took the same idea but changed it a little and tried it out again. It worked! I made a few more adjustments then I was happy.

I really enjoy building things with cardboard and my glue gun and I love being able to figure out how to make it work.