"Marble Madness" or "How Josh Pratt and Mike Rubino Conquered Everything"

3D Design Assignment: Make a sculpture that allows a marble to move on its own for 45 seconds, and then stop by itself. In order to get an A, the time has to be within 3 seconds of the 45 sec mark... you get three chances to accomplish this.

Josh and I spent almost three hours this morning creating a sculpture that did just that. Some of you may have witnessed this. We were in the 2nd Floor Solarium in Maura, outside of the music department taping pipe to the wall. The play was to have the marble travel through various sizes of PVC pipe.

But we ran into a few problems... mainly that after setting up over 3 yards of pipe, it only took 10 seconds for the marble to whiz through it! We would need something else to slow this little cat's eye down... That's when we brought in the honey. In the original plans, the marble was just going to end up in honey, which would make it stop naturally. But, after speaking with Prof. Beachley, we decided that we would make better use of the honey... Have the marble move through the honey, which would take three times as long as the track!

And so, we had the marble run through the track, and eventually (after about 11 seconds) it would drop into the cup and sink to the bottom. Amazingly enough it took 35 seconds for the marble to reach the bottom of the glass. And so, the practice runs would begin, after over 2 and a half hours of assembly.

We got our hands on 8 marbles: 5 for practice, and 3 for the time trials. Out of the 5 marbles that we ran through, 4 were successful. The 5th one had a total time of 51 seconds, which would have been a C+... we wanted the A. But Josh and I were confident, and we were afraid our project wouldn't last until Wednesday, which was the day the time trials were to happen. So we told her that we were ready, we wanted the time trials to happen TODAY!

At the end of class, she marched over to the Solarium, along with a handful of our classmates, to watch this crazy Double Dare event. We set up the marble, everyone gathered to watch... and when everyone was ready, I started the stopwatch and let go of the marble. It went through the tubes, popped out, and hit the lip of the cup! It bounced off down the hall. "Keep timing it! It didn't stop!" yelled Prof. Beachley. Our time was 20 seconds! It totally messed up, after working 10 times in a row... we were devastated. But we had two more chances.

Second chance... the marble starts a rolling.... it's going, going, going. And it falls short of the cup, bounces on the floor and rolls under Pratt, who was sitting next to the cup! Everyone started to freak out, I started screaming, Prof. started saying all sorts of things like "You sure you want to do this today?" We had one chance left to make it work or else...

We did a practice run after that, without the timer. It worked. So now it was time for the third go around.

The marble rolled, but go stuck on the inner workings of one of the pipes. I jostled the pipe for a second and set it free, however, during the mix the stopwatch messed up and stopped counting! The marble sank to the bottom of the honey. Professor allowed us to try it again, and this time she would operate the stop watch to make sure everything went smoothly. This was our last chance. If it didn't make it in the cup, we would fail the project, and severely damage our grades!

I rolled the marble on the count of three. Pratt left the hallway, afraid to see the outcome of the experiment. "If it doesn't work, I'm gonna flip out!" he said. The marble rolls through the pipes. It drops from layer of pipe to layer of pipe, everything going as planned... it falls out into the honey. And it begins its slow descent to the depths of the dining hall drinking glass.

"20 seconds!" Prof yelled
"30 seconds!" she said again
"It's not even half way," I responded
"35 seconds!" she said, as it was nearing the bottom
"40 seconds"
"45 SECONDS!" she said, as it was moments from the bottom. At this point I didn't think we were going to make it. And then-
"STOP!" I yelled, laying on the floor... the marble was at the bottom.
"48 SECONDS!" she responded. Three seconds after the designated time! We had JUST made it!

Everyone flipped out. People were clapping, I ran off and grabbed Pratt (who was in the music department hallway), and she declared that we had gotten an A. It was an amazing moment of triumph. I could hear the "Do you believe in miracles" phrase echoing in the background as Pratt and I shook hands several times.

We had done it. We had kept the faith and finished the race. We had gotten an A.