The Rube Goldberg experiment!

Dallin had an assignment to do a Rube Goldberg experiment.  He and 2 other friends decided that they wanted "the end result" to be able to open up a package of oreos.  

Here is a picture of one of the earlier models.  At first the kids set it up outside, but it was too windy, so they ended up moving it into Dallin's bedroom.  (This is Dallin and Hunter.)

It's hard to explain exactly what the chain of events were, but you can see that it started with a homemade bow and arrow.  It hit a cardboard circle, which caused a ball to fall down the "tongue depressor" track, knocking the wood that tipped over the blue cup (on the top). 

Here's Hunter taking a crack at it...
(And there's cute little Alexis on the right.  This was when Wendy was in town and Alexis wanted to "help" so I let her use my video camera to film the experiment.)
 



 

As I mentioned before, it got too windy, so they had to move it inside the house.

 



 

Inside Dallin's room...

Inside the blue cup there were 2 marbles.  When the cup was tipped over, the marbles fell out.  The goal was that at least one of them would fall onto the "duck-taped" road underneath.

 



Then the marble would roll down and hit a perfectly situated roll of toilet paper sitting on the top of the Tree Top box...

 



 

The toilet paper would then roll down the box and knock off the apple which was placed at the very end of the box, causing it to drop below into the hanging bowl.  Because the apple was so heavy, it caused the bowl to fall, thus triggering a "pulling" effect on the wooden stick that was attached to the Oreo package, causing the tab on the top to be "ripped" open.

 

Did you get all that?  Yeah, I didn't either.  You can see from the pictures that there other "props" used, and it was quite complicated.  Every piece had to do it's exact part or it wouldn't work.  It was actually quite amazing and after about 500 takes (literally), it finally worked.  Luckily we got it on video, and then we were done.  Dallin worked so hard on this project.  His other 2 friends were there in the beginning a couple of  times when they initially built the project outside, but behind the scenes, in Dallin's room, for days and hours at a time, mostly just Dallin, himself  worked on getting all of the chain of events to occur in one take .  It was pretty impressive!  Way to go Dallin!!  You did it!

 

(We don't have to do another one of these next year, do we?)  Just wondering....  :)