Middle and high school students will compete in the annual Rube Goldberg machine contest this Saturday (April 29) beginning at 9:30 a.m. in Union College's Memorial Fieldhouse.
This year's challenge: The machine must place a golf ball on a “tee” and then execute the swing of a putter and tap the ball (hopefully) into a hole.
Students are required to create a machine that can mimic motor skills by completing a simple task. Twenty-five area teams will participate this year, including one from Cooperstown.
Union College engineering professor James Hedrick oversees the contest each year. Volunteer judges from Knolls Atomic Power Lab (KAPL) and General Electric choose the winners based on effectiveness, complexity, creativity and presentation.
“We really try to get students interested in physics, math and science during the creation of these machines – that's the goal, much more so than the outcome of the competition,” said Hedrick.
The winning machine will be displayed at the Schenectady Museum. The competition will also be videotaped, and visitors to the museum will be able to view the tape.
This is the sixth year Union College will host the event. Niskayuna High School was triumphant last year for creating a machine that could remove the top from a 20-ounce bottle of soda and fill a 16-ounce cup, without spilling a drop. 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.
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.”
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.
The competition is sponsored by Union's Engineering program; General Electric; Lockheed Martin; KAPL and the Schenectady Museum and Suits-Bueche Planetarium.
For more information, visit http://engineering.union.edu/me_dept/rube/rube.html.