Rube Goldberg
The Rube Goldberg seminar was held by Mr. Fetting and Mr. Kozlovich, it ran from March 2nd to March 27. The main goal for this was to make a Rube Goldberg machine that followed a 1880-1920s theme. I worked with Jace Yesse and Ryan Krohn and we worked to create a NASA themed machine. During the seminar we talked about the history of America's progressive era and the guided age. Most of the things that we learned history wise were things that I already knew from the consumerism and leisure seminar. We briefly discussed the American involvement in WW1 but I had learned most of that information in the WW1 workshop. Aside from the history part of the seminar, we had the engineering part. All students were tasked with creating a Rube Goldberg machine which in my opinion was very cool. I have always liked to see Rube Goldberg machines and how they worked and had hoped to someday make my own so when this seminar came around, I was very happy. My group chose the theme to be NASA because we were all in the space exploration workshop and there we learned about the space race. Our plan was to have the machine eventually launch a rocket and we were able to keep that plan in tact but we ended up changing everything else. In the beginning when we were thinking of a design we made everything revolve around the theme and had plans for lots of things but when we started building we quickly realized that our plans were not going to work. Our machine was very motor oriented which means that each of our simple machines used a motor. The rest of the machine was made out of Fisher Technic pieces which were a pain to put together but worked well. Each machine needed to be at least 60 seconds long but with all of the problems and lack of materials we ended up having around 50 seconds of run time. I was very frustrated at times because many things didn't go as planned but I was happy with the final outcome. I think that this seminar was very fun and informative but I did have a hard time finding a book that related to the topic and was short enough for me to finish in a month. As for a book, I chose Alone Together and I really enjoyed what I read. In all I learned about some interesting history and the ups and downs of experimentation with a group.
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