Rube Goldberg Society

For the past few months, I have been participating in the Rube Goldberg Society. We are designing and building a Rube Goldberg machine to compete in nationals in March. For those who don't know, a Rube Goldberg machine is a complicated device that performs a simple task very inefficiently. This year, the task is to dispense hand sanitizer, and the theme of our machine is Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. So far, we have only built a few parts for it, but hopefully we'll get a lot done after break!

This has been a fun experience because I have had a chance to use all the physics I have learned and apply it in real life! While not much of the machine is built yet, what we've done has shown me that while the concepts I've learned have been helpful, the really complicated ideas don't always work out how you expect them to. For instance, one of the parts I was in charge of building was a lever, and when a car fell onto the lever, it lifted another lever up, which causes a pipe wrapped up in a "red carpet" to fall and trigger a mouse trap. You can see this in action in the video below! We had some difficulty making this, especially with finding the right weights to put on the levers and where (knowing about torque has finally come in handy!). We used a fair amount of trial-and-error, because not only did the lever have to stay horizontal before the car landed on it, it needed to lift the other lever just enough to make the pipe fall down. It took a few hours, but when we got it to work we knew it would be a great addition to the machine.

While we still have a ways to go, we have a lot of cool new ideas to try out! It seems that the coolest ideas are usually the trickiest to get to work, but I'm sure if we're creative enough we'll find a way.