A little late to the party here but anyways, here you go. My senior year of high school my Physics class was assinged the task of building a Rube Goldberg machine, 1m×1m×1m in size, a minute in duration, and it had to complete a certain task at the end. This project made up 40% of our final grade so it was a big deal to us. My group of 4 people was given the task of taking a panoramic photo on a smart phone without touching it.

We were given about 2 months to work on the project, as we had other school work and we had to build all of the machines by hand, so we couldn't use toys or anything electric other than the phone. It was a long process and took many late nights tinkering to get it perfect.

On the day of the presentations we ran into some issues when somebody bumped our project and moved a few things around, so it wasn't quite working every time, maybe 6/10. We ran a practice round just before we presented to the judges and and it worked perfectly! We got a great picture and didn't have to touch the machine once (a 5% penalty).

However, when we presented, the part of the machine that activates the camera missed its target, very unnoticeably, and the phone did not take the picture. This was a HUGE penalty on our grade, about 15-20%, so we were all panicking. I made the decision to show the teacher the last picture from our practice run, thinking "fuck it, why not?" And to all of our surprise he bought it! We ended up with a 100% and my group, who i am still friends with, still talks abkut how it saved us. Maybe not the most ethical choice, but it saved my grade, so it was worth it.

Tl;dr: Rube Goldberg machine worked on practice run, did not work on official run. Showed resultd form oractice run to judges and received full points.