Area middle and high school students face off Saturday, April 26, in the eighth annual Rube Goldberg Engineering Competition from 8:30 a.m. to 4 p.m. at Memorial Fieldhouse.
The event is free and open to the public.
Nearly 150 students, comprising 25 teams, will tackle this year’s engineering challenge to invent a machine no larger than 5 feet in length, width and depth that can draw a smiley face.
“The competition encourages students to apply physics theory to a real world problem using basic building skills,” said Jim Hedrick, lecturer for Electrical and Computer Engineering and director of the Rube Goldberg competition. Lance Spallholz, lab manager and instructor for Computer Science and Linda Almstead, senior lecturer for Computer Science, assist Hedrick with the competition.
The national 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 depicting “inventions” which epitomized “man’s capacity for exerting maximum effort to accomplish minimal results.”
In keeping with that theme, the competition involves making simple, ordinary tasks unnecessarily complex, cumbersome and convoluted by taking a two or three-step task and creating a machine to accomplish it in least 20 steps.
“This year’s challenge is actually quite hard,” Hedrick explained. “Transforming translational energy to circular energy is not easy because at least the face part must be drawn, not stamped. It will be interesting to see what solutions the students come up with.”
A team from Schenectady High School won last year’s competition, creating a machine that could open an umbrella. Past challenges have included sharpening a pencil, toasting a slice of bread, screwing a light bulb into a socket, putting toothpaste on a toothbrush and making a bologna sandwich.
The competition is sponsored by GE Volunteers, Lockheed Martin, KAPL Nova, the Schenectady Museum & Suits-Bueche Planetarium and the Union College Admissions Office and Engineering program.
The winning machine will be displayed at the Schenectady museum, along with a film of the competition.
For more information, visit http://engineering.union.edu/me_dept/rube/