The taqueria down the street from my childhood home had a gumball machine. For a quarter, I could watch a neon gumball leave a glass container and roll down a long, spiral ramp. I didn’t even like those stale gumballs, but I loved the machine.

Years later, when my engineering graphics professor asked us to model an interesting, original mechanism, I remembered the joy that gumball machine brought me.  As my team brainstormed potential products, we decided to amplify the key element of gumball machines that captured my attention all those years ago: the spectacle. We came up with a machine inspired by our Berkeley predecessor, Rube Goldberg. 

I worked with Quoc Ho and Sneh Jandial to design and animate the Rube Goldberg-inspired gumball machine. We each divided work among the group to model the individual parts in Creo Parametric and animate motion in Autodesk 3DS Max. I edited the video and completed the sound design in Adobe Premiere. The final product can be viewed on YouTube (or below).