Metaphorical Machinations

We just finished our latest Scimatics project, and once again, it’s reflection time! This project was called Metaphor Machines, and it was about Rude Goldberg machines and circuits. A Rude Goldberg machine is basically a machine that does something in an over-complicated way, and we had to put an electric circuit in ours. We also had to make our machine represent the scientific method, which is why it’s called a metaphor machine. This was a group project, so my group members were Thomas and Liam, and we focused on the machine itself first. We started off by making a path for a marble to travel through out of metre sticks. We added a lever mechanism, and we tried to add a pulley system, but it didn’t end up working out, so we had the lever end at a switch instead. Then we started working on the electrical circuit, which we wanted to connect to the switch at the end of the machine so that the marble would hit it and activate it. We had to reposition the switch, but we got the marble to hit the switch and turn on the lights at the end. After that, all we had to do was connect it to the scientific method. We had already planned out what we were going to do before we built the machine, so we labelled all the pre-determined parts with something that represented a step in the scientific method. Then we had to make a video showcasing our machine, and here is my group’s:

After the machine was completed, we had to update our project start mind map, but by some nefarious mechanism, mine was destroyed (My iPad broke and some of my files got deleted, including my MindNode ones.). I did learn the answers to some of my questions that were originally on my mind map, for example, I learned how circuits would tie into our machines, and how we would be using the scientific method in this project. There were also some core competencies to reflect on for this project, which you can see right here:For questioning and predicting, I feel like I met this competency, because my group managed to finish everything, and usually worked efficiently, although there were a few times where I felt we could be more focused. For reasoning and analyzing, I felt that I met this competency, because we finished our final blueprint with a grid scale and all the measurements we needed. For planning and conducting, I feel like I have met this competency because my group managed to incorporate our circuit into our metaphor machine, and we made a circuit diagram with all the required information… at least that’s what Thomas told me. And for the final competency, scientific communication, I feel like I have met this competency because our video showed how our machine worked, and also had a voiceover explaining how it related to the scientific method.

In conclusion, I learned a lot about circuits and Rude Goldberg machines, and refreshed my knowledge of the scientific method. It was also pretty fun creating the machine and the circuit, and I hope we will be able to do another project with this much hands on building in the future. That’s about it for this blog post, stay tuned for more!