our marble sorter for principles of engineering

    In the past few week of my engineering class,my group (Isaiah, Ian, Shana) and I, have been working and testing ways to sort at least three different kinds of marbles. We constructed a device using fisher tech equipment and some other materials to separate wood, metal, and glass marbles. To separate the wood and metal from the glass we found that the glass were slightly bigger that the wood and metal, so we made a section of the track small enough for the glass ones to role on but big enough for the wood and metal ones to fall through. To separate the wood marbles form the metal ones, we used fans to blow the wood ones out of the way but not the metal ones, because the wood ones were significantly lighter than the metal ones.  Another aspect of the challenge was to make a funnel to set the marbles in to the sorter, for this we made a cone-like structure out of styro-paper and cardboard. When we were ready for our final test we came across some complications, first was the funnel, when we dropped the marbles they would jam at the exit of the funnel. Another complication that we came across was that when it came time for the wood to be separated from the metal, the marbles would be going too fast and wouldn't be affected by the fan. With a few modifications,  we were on our way to a semi functional marble sorter.