Year 8 Science

Making Rube Goldberg Machines 

As part of their Energy Investigation, students from Year 8 designed, assembled and modified a successful Rube Goldberg machine. It involved an object moving down the machine while demonstrating four different energy transformations and finishing by popping a balloon at the end. The girls soon discovered that the engineering process requires a lot of trial and error and creative problem solving to make a design on paper turn into an actual functioning machine. They worked extremely hard on their machines and many lunchtimes and early mornings were spent making adjustments so that it would work as planned. 

The final machines were very impressive and included elements such as pulleys, bells, cars, water bottles, pendulums, touch-activated light switches and even musical instruments! The students also handed in a booklet documenting their design process and explaining the energy transformations. Overall, this was a very successful task and the students should be congratulated for their perseverance and excellent work ethic. 

Joanna Altinidis

Science Teacher