Because I feel like it.: Rube Goldberg Machine

So, last Thursday, instead of heading down to NTU for a normal work day, DSO very nicely organised an IA retreat to Sentosa for the interns! This includes about 20 of us, 1 from NUS, some DSTA scholars, and the rest from NTU.

Initially, I went there with the expectation to have fun playing on the beach, like you know, beach volleyball + Monopoly deal (or some similar card game) + tanning. I miss those days where the gang would just go to Sentosa for the fun of it, to slack with the surf and sun :D. Too bad we don't do so these days, everyone's busy. But hey, at least we still get to have dinner quite often, I guess? Anyway I'm digressing. It totally wasn't what I expected at all, it was more of a leadership training course, something like OBS but only for one day.

So, you're probably thinking, what on earth did your retreat have to do with this thing called a "Rube Goldberg Machine?". Yeah, be patient! I'm getting to it!! We had 2 challenges throughout the day, the first one being some sort of GPS navigation sort of treasure hunt, which my group won! I think my group is damn zai, cause we had 3 DSTA scholars who are like, geniuses or something. Something like that. The second challenge was to construct a rollercoaster out of raw materials like newspapers, straws, the likes.

Which is where I should start explaining why that challenge reminded me of a Rube Goldberg machine.

So basically, I learnt about such a machine from Mythbusters. Yes, that show is a treasure trove of useless but very interesting information. It's basically an extremely complex machine designed with loads of stages that's meant to accomplish a task that could be done simply. There are plenty of videos on YouTube, so I'm gonna embed only one here, because you have to watch it; it's seriously awesome and addictive.

LOL at Adam describing all the various cause and effects of the Rube Goldberg machine! I love Mythbusters! Seriously, used to watch it at 1pm on Discovery everyday during the holidays, but that can't happen this year since I have no holidays until like, December. Yeah. That's sad... Anyway, I showed the Mythbusters one because I have absolute confidence in them that it was taken in a single shot, that there's no cheating whatsoever, which in my opinion makes it more amazing.

But moving on~! Each group was tasked to make a rollercoaster each, which was pretty alright. My group, being the winning group of the morning had the most materials, and also we had the smartest guys (aforementioned 3 scholars), so it really wasn't a problem. And our roller coaster worked like, 95% of the time, so yay :)

The hard part was combining all 4 roller coasters from 4 different groups together, each roller coaster either continuing it's track on the next one, OR triggering some mechanism to make the next rollercoaster start it's journey. And so, that reminded me of the Rube Goldberg machine!!

First, let's take a look at the entire thing. So the flying fox belongs to one group, the one after the flying fox belongs to my group!

Okay so this is how it goes. The flying fox ball hits the ball at the top of my group's roller coaster. It's easier said than done because we had to adjust the angle and trajectory to make sure the flying fox ball doesn't hit my track after it sets off my tennis ball.

At the end of my track comes the jump down to the next track. It might look like we were just relying on luck for the jump to connect to the next track, but it really jumped well, had a success rate of around 85% I'd say!

The 3rd group's downward track:

This group also had some sort of turn and derailment to add more excitement to their ride lol. If you can see there's a sheet of newspaper on the outer edge of the swerve. It worked pretty well in pushing the ball back on track.

Clearer view of the turn:

Okay so after the turn it supposedly hits the sticks there to set off the next ball. I don't know how it works because I was working on the earlier part of the coaster.

A clearer shot of the 3rd-4th rollercoaster triggering mechanism, whatever you wanna call it. Anyway I think it was some really delicate system. A slight nudge would have set the 4th coaster off immediately. Also because it was so unstable, it was really hard to place the ball exactly right so that a small movement would set it off.

The ball then rolls down the final slope into this white transparent bag!!

Another angle:

So then, I guess you could say the entire purpose of our Rube Goldberg machine was to package spherical items. LOL. Just like the Mythbusters' one was to knock poor Buster off a chair, hahaha.

I have a video, it isn't mine, I ripped it off Facebook. Yeah you can do that! Just use FIREFOX ADDONS! Firefox rocks my world, seriously. You can't really see it clearly, but it worked, and we were plenty happy about that.