Winter Exhibition

We were assigned to create a Rube Goldberg machine that symbolized the French Revolution. First, we were assigned to create an infographic to learn about our revolution and have the necessary skills to build our skills and connect it to the French Revolution. In case you didn’t know a Rube Goldberg is a chain reaction of items to perform a goal. We started out by planning out what each individual person wanted to do and we took one connection from each person and connected them all together. After we did that we tried to sort out all the flaws and got right to building. My idea for the project was to get a bouncy ball to go down ramps and ping pong back and forth off floorboards and then go down a ramp. I decided to cut out hard cardboard and manipulate it into the correct shapes and glue floor boards to some of them. This only took me a few days to finish my part of the project. After I built this I realized the ball was falling out before it hit the end so I had to change it to make it more fluid and consistent. Since I finished early I tried to help wherever else was needed. I didn’t know the hardest part was yet to come. Almost everyone had their machines done with around three days to go until the thing and my group thought they were done but now we still had to connect all of them together. I found this was the hardest part because my group decided to ignore it until the last minute and focus on decorations. I personally didn’t agree with this and tried to work on mine but I needed everyone else’s to be complete so I could work on mine. Unluckily one of our group’s machines got broken and I only got one day to connect them so I couldn’t get it working consistently. Sadly we never got a successful run-through before the presentation but we tried our best and hoped it worked during the actual fair. We had a nice setup and explained ours well but when it got to the actual machine it didn’t go well stuff that we expected to work didn’t work and the stuff we didn’t expect to work did. My machine worked every time I set it up but that didn’t really matter because the machines before didn’t work. Although it didn’t work I had a fun time doing this and I learned a lot from it. If I were to do this again I would have liked to double-check things and have a better time plan so we could deal with mistakes.