Winners of the eighth annual Rube Goldberg Engineering Competition, held Saturday at Memorial Fieldhouse, are surely smiling this year.
The area middle and high school students who took part in this year’s engineering challenge were asked to invent a machine no larger than 5 feet in length, width and depth, which can draw a smiley face.
Nearly 150 students grouped in 25 teams tackled the problem. The winners are:
First Place: Going Green, Schenectady Christian School; Advisor Karl Kunker
Second Place: Integral of e^yx, WSWHE (Washington, Saratoga, Warren, Hamilton, Essex counties) BOCES; Advisor Mike Sgambelluri
Third Place: The Huffy Killers, North Warren Central School District; Advisor Scott Robertson.
This year’s challenge was “actually quite hard,” said Jim Hedrick, Electrical and Computer Engineering lecturer and director of the event. “Transforming translational energy to circular energy is not easy because the face part must be drawn, not stamped.”
Hedrick was assisted by Lance Spallholz, lab manager and Computer Science instructor, and Linda Almstead, Computer Science, senior lecturer.
Competition sponsors were Union’s Engineering program and Office of Admissions, General Electric, Lockheed Martin, KAPL Nova and the Schenectady Museum & Suits-Bueche Planetarium.
The late Rube Goldberg was an engineer and Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist whose works appeared in thousands of daily newspapers from 1914 to 1964 depicting “inventions” that 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.
The winning machine and a film of the competition will be displayed at the Schenectady museum. For more information, visit http://engineering.union.edu/me_dept/rube/.