I need help with an IR transmitter, receiver, and a DC motor

Hah, no thats not the case. The class assignment is actually Science Olympiad. I need to create a Rube Goldberg machine that can only use certain tasks. I have it all done except for this which happens to be one of the tasks. We have to be creative for this rather than using things we learned in class. Actually this is being assigned to me from my Biology class