As part of Cal Poly's Mechanical Engineering curriculum, you spend a full year working on a senior project with three other students. Each group has a different project, and it is determined by company sponsors. For our group's project, we did a project for a kid's science museum at the Bellevue-Santa Fe Charter School in San Luis Obispo.

We were tasked with creating a new science display for their museum and we chose to make a giant Rube Goldberg style marble run wall. Our exhibit is highly interactive and engaging for students and requires them to build their own marble track designs using a variety of modules we designed. These modules expose the students to several physic concepts indirectly. While this project may not be the most complicated project in terms of engineering concepts and analysis. This project was a good exercise in terms of creativity, designing for specific users in mind, and ease of manufacturing.

This module is a marble staircase. The marble enters through the left side of the module and the user then turns the black crank to move alternating staircases up and down. This slowly moves the marble upwards where it exits at the top right. This module was designed to be printed in only four parts (the main body, the cam shaft, and the two cam shaft holders). The main body of the staircase is printed all in one piece, where the stair steps were "printed in place", meaning they were printed with enough spacing where they do not require additional assembly or post processing to properly move up and down.

The toggle switch is a module that acts like an alternating switch. The marbles enter through the top funnel of the part and drop down into the switch. Each time a marble drops through the funnel it flips the switch back and forth, causing the next marble to exit on the opposite side of the module. It basically alternates dropping marble on the left and then right side of the module. This module was designed to be printed in one part to minimize the number of components and to make mass production easier.

This marble chute is just a simple fun little marble slide with multiple curves to create a fun wobbly motion as the marble slides down the chute. This module was designed to work in any orientation that the students may possibly place it in. This module was also printed in a single part for ease of manufacturing. It is a good example of how we had a good mix of more complex and really simple modules like this one.