Did you hear what the foolish gardener did? The guy planted a light bulb and though he’d get a power plant. The project we just finished was called “Metaphor Machines” and we learned about many things. But the main focus was electricity. 

Like many scimatics projects, we did a lot of workbook pages and read many text books. But this time instead of starting with those, we started by looking at “Rube Goldberg Machines”. Something that I’ve seen many times before on youtube. However I’ve thought about making one at school. We watched many videos, most of which I’ve seen before, but they were still very cool to watch. We also watched examples from projects in the past which were very cool as well. 

Around that time we also got put into groups. To my surprise I got put into a group with Declan and Alfie, some friends of mine and Ben T one of my acquaintances. Once I got put into that group I knew that I would have a fun time. 

We then started on the blueprint for our Rube Goldberg machines. At first we did it separately, but once we finished it we would show it to our team mates. We would then collaborate together to make one final blueprint. We also made a diagram for a circuit that we would put somewhere in our Rube Goldberg machine. 

Shortly after we finished the blueprint, we started painting the board that we would build our machine on. It didn’t take long to do so because it was already well painted, we just painted over the little scuffs. We then got all of the pieces of wood that we would be putting on to the Rube Goldberg machine. We ended up having to cut a couple of them down but it all ended up being the perfect size. We then tried out different ways that were close to our original blueprint. It ended up being a bit different in some areas but over all, it was pretty similar. The only big difference was the placement of the switch that turns on the light bulb. 

After we tried it out a couple times and made some more adjustments, it started working consistently. Once it did, we started filming it each time it went down until we got the perfect one. After we did, we recorded a voice over of each part of the machine and why it was like a step of the scientific method. Then I edified it all together and posted it to YouTube. 

In conclusion, I learned many things in this project. Not just from the textbooks or workbooks, but also from the experiments. I now know how many different electrical things work around my house, so thanks. I hope that I don’t forget much of what I learned by the end of the month. 

Go checkout my teammates blog posts. https://www.blog44.ca/alfieh https://www.blog44.ca/bent and https://www.blog44.ca/declanr 

Also to watch our Rube Goldberg machine in action, press the link here.