Is the glass half empty or half full? For middle and high school students coming to Union College's Rube Goldberg Machine Contest Saturday, April 30, this question of optimism versus pessimism won't matter as much as just getting the liquid in the glass.
This year's task in the annual invention contest will be to build a machine that will remove the top from a 20-ounce bottle of soda and fill a 16-ounce cup, preferably without spilling. Set-up will start at 8:30 a.m. and competition will follow at 9:30 a.m. in the College's Field House.
This is the fifth year Union is hosting the event. Previous competitions' tasks included opening a bag of M&Ms, toasting a slice of bread, sticking a stamp on a letter, and making a baloney sandwich. Last year, teams developed contraptions that took a pie out of a box, put it on a plate then added a dollop of whipped cream. A team from Niskayuna's Van Antwerp Middle School took top prize in 2004. This year 21 teams from 11 local school districts and BOCES will compete.
The competition is named for the late Rube Goldberg, an engineer and Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist. His cartoons appeared in thousands of daily newspapers from 1914 to 1964. The “inventions,” he said, symbolized “man's capacity for exerting maximum effort to accomplish minimal results.” His name has become eponymous for anything that is unnecessarily complex, cumbersome, or convoluted.
Contest machines must use at least 20 steps to complete the task and must be no larger than 5 feet in length, depth and height. Each entering team receives an honorarium of $100 for supplies to build their machine. Contest director is James Hedrick, professor of engineering at Union.
The competition is sponsored by Union's Engineering program and Admission's Office, Knolls Atomic Power Lab, and the GE Elfun Society. Members of the GE Elfun Society will judge the contest, choosing winners based on effectiveness, complexity, creativity and presentation.
For more information, visit http://engineering.union.edu/me_dept/rube/rube.html.