Heya @Mary_Peters and welcome to the forums! 
To debug recording-related issues, try Extract Simulation.
It’ll help identify whether the simulation is coming out alright, and whether the problem lies with attaching the controls to it afterwards. Which you can also test manually - by constraining your controls to the extracted simulation - or automatically.
Likely that the controls you are recording onto can’t be animated like you’d expect, in this case I would expect the translate and rotate channels to all be unlocked, for example.
Give that a go, and let us know what you find.