National Rube Goldberg Competition

This past weekend, I was able to go to Purdue University and participate in the National Rube Goldberg Competition. (For those of you who may not know what I am talking about, go here or watch this.)

The task to complete this year was to change an incandescent light bulb to a more efficient one. I helped the American Society of Mechanical Engineers out with their Super Mario Brothers Themed machine this year. We competed at the Regional Competition held here on campus against 4 other groups who has equally qualified machines. However, we ended up winning and secured a trip to Purdue to represent Penn State.

Before getting to nationals, I personally had no idea what to expect. I had heard that previous winners had over 100 steps. Our machine only had about 50 steps, which made me nervous. So after making the 10-11 hour drive out to Purdue on Friday, the 6 of us were getting nervous. We started the weekend off with a dinner in what I think was Purdue's "President's" Box of their stadium. It was extremely neat because I have never been to their football stadium, and to be able to look all the way down on it, was just amazing.

The next day we had the actual competition. Here we found ourselves up against 5 other teams from Illinois with a "Clue Theme", Texas with a "Jurassic Park Theme", Michigan Tech with a "Super Heroes Theme", St. Olaf with a "Crazy Scientist Theme", and Ferris State with a "House of Rube Theme". Each of these teams had an impressive machine and it was clear to see that we had our work cut out for us.

With the results in, we ended up not placing, but needless to say, I had a blast. Being able to talk to people, especially little kids, and to be able to teach them something was well worth it. Overall St. Olaf took both first place overall and People's Choice award.

St. Olaf is a liberal arts school which makes me wonder if all of the engineering teams just over thought the entire task. Then I learned that they had a budget that was 6 times that of what we had, which gave them a lot more opportunities then us. So maybe it was more along the lines of that? There are so many questions as to what it could have been, but I do know that their machine was quite impressive, especially for non-engineering majors.

I hope that more people will become interested in the Rube Competition here on campus because it is something that can be challenging and fun at the same time. I know that I wished I would have gotten involved sooner, because I had a lot of fun working on it this year.

(I'll post a video and pictures of our machine at a later date!)