Students Win Complicated Contest Easily

Why make things easy, really, when you can make them hard?

That's the attitude seven freshmen adopted when they came up with an idea for the national Rube Goldberg competition. Goldberg, an engineer-turned-newspaper cartoonist who died in 1970, was famous for imagining, and drawing, hilarious cartoons depicting machines that took a dozen or more goofy steps to perform one simple act.

Following in his footsteps, the Maine South students made a simple task so comically difficult that they won the school competition Feb. 1, and a regional competition at Navy Pier Feb. 17.

When they went to a national competition March 17 at Ferris State University in Big Rapid, Mich., they placed unofficially fourth (based on their own tally of points) out of 13 teams from Michigan, Ohio, Wisconsin, Illinois and Texas. 

"It didn't matter how far we went because it was so fun," said Matt Weiss, one of the team members. "That's the most important thing, having fun. I wish more kids our age in our school knew about it."

They managed to work their science knowledge into their task, which was to devise a Rube Goldberg-type machine that would inflate and pop a balloon in 20 or more steps. 

Those steps include having a marble roll down a funnel into a bowl, a string pulling a pot to tilt up, spaghetti boxes falling down and hitting a fork which turns on the power of an electric mixer. And much, much more, which you can see in the video attached to this story.

"We inflated it (the balloon) by using negative pressure," explained Lisa Soderlind, a team member.

Ryan Kovacin thought all the other teams would be using Alka Seltzer or a baking soda and vinegar combination to create gas that would cause negative pressure. 

"So we thought we'd do something very different," he said. That was to use an actual vacuum cleaner to create the vacuum.

The team members--who also include Jimmy Connolly, Grace Mauery, Andrew Lazara and Chris Tulban in addition to those mentioned earlier--all say it was a good experience for them.

"We're already thinking about next year," Lazara said. 

Sign up for a free subscription to Patch local news, events and fun. And did we mention free food giveaways?