Communication
The project in which I communicated the most in was my Rube Goldberg project. My partners in this project were Justin and Nate, and we all talked about and shared our ideas on how to create a successful and creative Rube Goldberg Machine. In this project, there were different roles, and my role was being the Project Manager, so I was consistently making sure our project was going well and that we would finish it on time. My group shared ideas for each part of the project, so we all came up with different parts. For example, we talked about how we wanted to start the machine, and I came up with the idea of using a kid’s toy, shown in the photo above, and letting marbles roll down it. One of my partners, Nate, then came up with the idea of using a cup to catch the marbles. He then put the cup on a Hot Wheels track, which would connect to another Hot Wheels track by a popsicle stick. This would lead to the second part of our machine. My other partner, Justin, came up with an idea near the end of our machine to let a ball hit dominoes, which would make them fall one by one and would press a lever to turn on a blender. With our communication, we were also able to overcome problems in our machine by sharing ideas and testing them out. Overall, my group was successfully able to create a complex Rube Goldberg Machine by sharing our ideas, testing out those ideas, sharing our opinions, and listening to what everyone has to say.
Critical Thinking
During my Rube Goldberg Project, I was able to come up with successful ideas to get it to work. Like I said previously, I came up with the idea of rolling marbles down a kid’s toy. This worked at first, but near the end of my group’s project, we encountered a problem where the kid’s toy was starting to bend due to the marbles weight. To fix this problem, I used critical thinking by adding a support to hold the toy up, using a hand sanitizer bottle. There was also another problem during the machine, where my group was trying to get a marble to hold still on a Hot Wheels track, but it kept falling. I was able to come up with an idea to fix this problem by simply taping the track to the item it was on, which was a radio. These simple solutions were able to help fix the Rube Goldberg Machine. My partners came up with ideas to fix solutions as well, such as how to turn on the blender, the radio, and more. We all also built off of each other’s ideas, such as my idea to fix the problem with the kid’s toy. After I came up with the solution, my group members realized that the hand sanitizer could have had even more support if there was a block underneath it, making it taller. We did just that. For next time, I would consider all the possibilities that could go wrong with the machine before moving onto the next part of it. Doing this, I would ensure a successful project.
