15 July / Rube Goldberg Project

Describe your Rube Goldberg project experience.  (For example, mention your objective, your thinking process, your groups' experiences during this week, how you will or can use this in your teaching, etc). 

You may wonder what  Rube Goldberg means... So did I when I first listened that name. Here it is the definition:

" a comically involved complicated invention, laboriously contrived to perform a simple operation"

All of us were grouped in 6 teams of 5, and were asked to develope a machine to dispense hand sanitizer in a minimum of 6 steps. The other teachers in my team (Ricardo, Luis, Alicia & Patricia) and I were quite lost at first, but finally we have managed to build our machine. I'll try to describe it as accurately as possible, but in case you don't understand, you can see the picture below.

First we fixed a pencil to a mousetrap, which had been previously attached to a casette folder and to the table, just to make it a more solid structure. When we set off the mousetrap, the pencil would hit a canister, and make it fall off the table. On top of the canister, there was a reel tied to a pulley with fishing strain. The other end of that strain had been tied to the handle of a big bucket. The pulley was fixed to the celing. So, when the canister fell, the reel also fell, and pulled the strain so that it lifted the handle of the bucket. We had accoplated a segment of isulation pipe to the bucket to build a slide. When the handle of the bucket lifted, it let a marble go down the slide. The marble hit a row of dominoes, the last of which would set off another mousetrap. We tied a strain to the latter and hanged a hammer at the other end, so when the trap set off, the hammer fell down hitting the hand sanitizer dispenser on the floor.