Winners of the 6th annual Rube Goldberg Machine Contest were announced recently. Area middle and high school students competed in the April 29 event at Union College's Memorial Fieldhouse.
This year's challenge entailed making a machine that could place a golf ball on a “tee”, swing a putter and tap the ball into a hole.
Students were required to create a machine that can mimic motor skills by completing a simple task. Twenty-five area teams will participated.
Rube Goldberg Contest 2006 winners are the following:
First Place: SAEC-WSWHE BOCES (Southern Adirondack Education Center – Washington Saratoga, Hamilton, Essex, BOCES). Hudson Falls, NY; Advisor: Mike Sgambelluri; Team Name: The Vagabonds; Team members: Dan Elton, Jason Rankins, Nick Cowan, Mackenzie Buck and Jake D'Acchille.
Second Place: Questar III Troy NY; Advisor: Tammie Borland; Team Name: The Putt-Putt All Stars; Team members: Corey Parks, Stephanie Brooker and Sheila Tilman.
Third Place School: Questar III Troy NY Advisor: Tammie Borland Team Name: Deus Ex Machina; Team members: Kevin Glasser, Ryan Vaughan and Jonathan Marini.
Union College engineering professor James Hedrick oversees the contest each year. Volunteer judges from Knolls Atomic Power Lab (KAPL) and General Electric chose 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 was also be videotaped, and visitors to the museum will be able to view the tape.
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 had to 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 receiveed an honorarium of $100 for supplies to build their machine.
The competition was 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.