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| * Purdue University Rube Goldberg |
February 9,2007
Students get daily dose of vitamin C at Rube Goldberg contest
WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. - |
The 24th annual event will take place at 10:30 a.m. Feb. 24, with the winner moving on to the March 31 national competition. Purdue teams have won the national competition for the past four years.
Both the regional and national events will take place in the Purdue Armory, with doors opening at 9:30 a.m. The contests, sponsored by Phi Chapter of Theta Tau fraternity, are free and open to the public.
For this year's competition, the challenge is to squeeze the juice from an orange into a pitcher and then pour the juice into a glass.
Purdue teams registered to compete in this year's regional contest are the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, Purdue Society of Professional Engineers, Society of Hispanic Professional Engineers and the Society of Women Engineers. A team from Murray State University in Murray, Ky., also will participate.
The Indiana High School Rube Goldberg Machine Contest will follow the Purdue regional competition awards ceremony. The high school event is being coordinated by the Purdue Society of Women Engineers and will begin at 2 p.m.
"We've turned the event into a full day of fun," said Sean Noonan, a sophomore majoring in mechanical engineering from Perrineville, N.J., and Theta Tau's regional contest chairman. "We'll also have food venders at the event so families can spend the entire day at Purdue. Because of the high school competition, we're expecting the largest crowd ever."
Indiana high schools participating in the event include the International School of Indiana, Indianapolis; Richmond High School, Richmond; Noblesville High School, Noblesville; Newburgh Christian School, Newburgh; Delphi Community High School, Delphi; Highland Senior High School, Anderson; Southport High School, Indianapolis; Greenfield Central High School, Greenfield; Guerin Catholic High School, Noblesville; Kouts High School, Kouts; Anderson Highland High School, Anderson; South Putnam Junior/Senior High School, Greencastle; and Mooresville High School, Mooresville. Brandywine High School of Niles, Mich., also will participate.
About 1,400 people attended last year's regional contest.
The competition pits teams of students and their machines against each other with the goal of completing simple tasks in the most complicated ways possible. Teams will be judged by the complexity, creativity and ingenuity they use to design the machines and perform the task. The winning machines must complete two successful runs, and points are deducted if students have to assist the machine once it has started. While 20 steps is the minimum number required to complete the task, most teams will use many more.
Last year's regional and national winning team, the Purdue Society of Professional Engineers, took 215 steps to shred five sheets of paper. The same team won the regional and national contests in 2005 with a machine that is now listed in the Guinness World Records as the largest working Rube Goldberg machine ever constructed.
This year contestants also will be able to bring their resumes to the event. The resumes will be given to judges and sponsors.
"This is the first year we have done this," Noonan said. "It's a great way for students to network with the judges and sponsors, who also are potential employers."
Sponsors for this year's event include Omega Engineering Inc. of Stamford, Conn.; Minute Maid Co.; BAE Systems; Bosch Group Inc.; Daimler-Chrysler Corp.; Fluor Corp.; General Electric Co.; Kimberly-Clark Corp.; Lockheed Martin Corp.; and Motorola Inc. Purdue's College of Engineering and College of Technology also support the event.
The competition pays homage to the late cartoonist Rube Goldberg, who specialized in drawing whimsical machines with complex mechanisms to perform simple tasks. Goldberg earned a degree in engineering from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1904. He worked as an engineer for the city of San Francisco for less than a year before becoming a sports cartoonist for the San Francisco Chronicle. He received a Pulitzer Prize in 1948 for his political cartoons published by the New York Sun.
In past years, teams in the national competition have included Purdue, the University of Texas at Austin, Hofstra University, Ohio State University, the University of Toledo and George Washington University. This year marks the 19th national contest.
In previous contests, students' machines have been required to select, clean and peel an apple; make a cup of coffee; toast a piece of bread; put a stamp on an envelope; and drop a penny into a piggy bank. Winners have appeared on television shows internationally, including CBS' "This Morning," ABC's "Good Morning America," NBC's "Today," "Newton's Apple," "Ripley's Believe it or Not," the Fox News Network and CNN. Purdue's national competition winning teams from the past two years have been featured on "Jimmy Kimmel Live."Writer: Cynthia Sequin, (765) 494-4192, csequin@purdue.edu
Source: Sean Noonan, (201) 726-4695, snoonan@purdue.edu
Purdue News Service: (765) 494-2096; purduenews@purdue.edu
PHOTO CAPTION:
From left, Sebastian Chavez, a Purdue industrial engineering major, watches his team's machine finish a successful run in the 2006 Rube Goldberg Regional Machine Contest, while Cesar Lozano, a mechanical engineering graduate, and Mariano Sanchez, an industrial engineering major, celebrate. The students were members of the Purdue chapter of the Society of Hispanic Professional Engineers team. Last year's competition required teams to use a minimum of 20 steps to individually shred five sheets of paper. The 2006 winning team, the Purdue chapter of the Society of Professional Engineers, used 215 steps to complete the task and went on to win the Rube Goldberg National Machine Contest. (Purdue News Service file photo/David Umberger)
A publication-quality file photo is available at https://www.purdue.edu/uns/UNS/images/+2007/rube-adv07.jpg
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