Hello! Welcome to my newest blog post, on my latest scimatics project! In this blog post I will be reflecting on the creation of a Rube Goldberg machine !
This machine is created to be a metaphor for the Scientific Method. Our machine will include parallel and series electrical circuits as well as six or more different mechanisms that represent the six steps of the Scientific Method. In addition to creating our machine, we must also create a scaled blueprint to go along with it!
As always, here’s the driving question: What Factors Affect the Function and Efficiency of Electric Circuits?
Before I tell you about my reflection, you might want to be reminded of what the Scientific Method is. The Scientific method is an approach to seeking knowledge that involves forming and testing a hypothesis. The scientific method is used for most experiments within science and other fields.
You may also be wondering, ‘Mickey! What exactly is a Metaphor Machine?’ Well, as I mentioned to you earlier, this machine is a Rube Goldberg machine. A Rube Goldberg machine is a contraption that uses a chain reaction to carry out a simple task.
Now unfortunately I was not here for the beginning parts of this project because of a personal unexpected emergency, though I heard this project started off with watching something called Junkwars!
Then we got to working on our mindmaps! As always, they contained our immediate thoughts, ideas and questions, so.. here’s mine!
I feel that I was able to represent an accomplished level of understanding with the competency “Questioning and Predicting” with my mindmap because I was able to exemplify a good curiosity for the scientific topics in this project while making connections to my previous understandings as well!
Speaking of understanding, Our next phase of the project was to learn about electrical circuits! To do this, we read and completed three textbooks/workbooks about said topic. This allowed us to have an idea of how we could include and build electrical circuits into our machine safely and correctly. When learning about circuits, we often used this circuit construction website to help visualize our learning.
During the phase of the project, we also completed our next milestone for this project, electricity labs! In this milestone, we worked with our group to answer three questions through using the scientififc method. During said labs, we were able to use real electricity and create circuit diagrams, use formulas, and apply our overall understanding of electricity to the real world.
These experiments allowed us to gather knowledge we would need for our machines later!
The next part of our project was to gain an understanding of how we can design our blueprint for our machine. To do this, we learned about scale diagrams and how to convert real objects to scale onto paper (well really ipad but..y’know)using math! To do this, we used Khan academy. Khan academy often confuses me a lot more than I generally get, so it was a bit difficult for me to understand how to scale things from the videos. But eventually I got it!
Before we started the actual building process we completed a first individual, and then a group blueprint! Before the building stage, we actually had spring break so a total two week pause on this project!
But after all of the blueprints, it was time to build!
Four classes later, we were finally finished and ready to film our creation! Are you ready to see it in this lovely video? I bet you areeeee:
Overall I thought this project was super cool, and though it may not have been one of my favourites, it was certainly interesting! I feel as though I gained an accomplished understanding of all of the curricular competencies we completed, and I think our Rube Goldberg machine turned out pretty cool so.. I hope you liked it!!
i think we did an accomplished job of both describing and visualizing our machine, as well as our planning and conducting, which could’ve gone a little smoother but it wasn’t too bad, which is why I believe we accomplished this!
We did a lot of questioning and predicting with our mindmaps and through trial and error of our machine, so I would say we accomplished that as well, and finally I would say we analyzed our work reasonably through our video, so I would say we accomplished that too!
I hope you liked my post,
Arrivederci!