Teamwork Sparkles

Energy Transfer Machine

The Changing Color Egg Machine

We worked on an energy transfer machine which used the following materials: upcycled cardboard, a wiffle ball, a marble, tape, furniture to create slopes, upcycled cardboard boxes, upcycled metal cans, 2 AA batteries (3 volts of chemical energy), two snap connectors, 1 flashing color LED light, 1 plastic egg with a whole in the bottom to put over the LED light, lots of glitter, stars, tape and sparkle, lots of teamwork.

Team Members: Anay, Ava, Dylan, Jehudiel, Jenna, Riley

Our energy transfer machine steps completed are:

We drop our marble and the force of gravity pulls it down our first slope which is balancing on two wiggle stools to make it really tall.
The marble slides down our cardboard open tube which is balanced at the end on a turned metal can.
At the end of the first tube, the marble drops down into another tube that has a wiffle ball wedged at the top.
The wiffle ball rolls down hitting dominoes that are lined up at the end.
The dominoes use the energy to fall into each other and hit a second marble that is waiting on the edge of the next tunnel.
The wiffle ball stops by a piece of tape that we put on top of the tube to hold the ball still using friction.
The marble that the domino hits travels all the way to the end of our last tunnel which is long and has a smaller slope. It is held up in the middle by another wiggle stool, an old box, the inside of a masking tape roll, and an old tin can.
When the marble gets to the end of the last tunnel, it knocks straight into a snap connector that is barely held up by a domino.
The energy that hits the snap circuit causes the domino to get pushed out of the way.
This causes the snap circuit to land on another snap circuit which closes the electrical circuit.
The electrical circuit uses the energy from the batteries to convert the chemical energy in the batteries into electrical energy.
This causes our light bulb to light up which makes our egg light up and show all of its sparkly colors.

Use of Electricity Statement: Our machine use the stored chemical energy from the battery to power our light. This happened when the domino was pushed out of the way by the marble which mad the metal on the snap connectors to touch each other so the electricity could flow through the circuit.

Final Step Statement: Our final step is to use the electricity to light up the egg to make it change colors. Our teamwork sparkled in the end when we tried so many times to make the marble hit the connector just right to knock out the domino to close the circuit to light up our egg.

A marble is dropped down a ramp, which pushes the wiffle ball, that then knocks over the dominoes, those dominoes push a marble down towards the light circuit, which closes from bumping the domino holding up one connector out of the way so the metal conductors will touch, which completes the circuit and allows the electricity to move to the LED light so the egg will light up.