This year, a team from Washington University in St. Louis won the Rube Goldberg Machine Contest College Nationals. A video below captures the elaborate machine in action.
Named for the late cartoonist and inventor, the annual competition challenges college students to design a machine that uses the most complex processes to complete a simple task. Goldberg’s popular cartoon series depicted complex gadgets performing easy tasks in indirect, convoluted ways.
Devices in the competition must complete the task with a minimum of 20 steps. The WUSTL students designed a contraption that hammers a nail with maximal inefficiency.
Team members are: Amy Patterson and Harison Wiesman, sophomore and junior physics majors in Arts & Sciences, and Grace Kuo amd Alexa Lichtenstein, sophomore electrical engineering and senior mechanical engineering majors in the School of Engineering & Applied Science.
The competition was held March 30 at the Center of Science and Industry in Columbus, Ohio.
For more information, visit rubegoldberg.com.