Rube Goldberg club competes for gold

March 16, 2015

On Friday, March 13, Homestead’s Rube Goldberg club headed off to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign to show off its unique machine at the 2015 Rube Goldberg Machine Contest . The team consisted of 16 AP Calculus C students and was advised by Mr. Paul Sivanich, physics teacher.

The assignment was to create a machine to erase a chalkboard. Everything in between, however, was up to the group’s imagination. After seven months of after-school and weekend meetings, the end result was a childhood games-themed mechanism.

However, this competition was anything but a game. At their arrival, the students had just two hours to construct their 39-step machine. “It was hard not to get frustrated at times, but I thought we worked together to solve problems,” Jack Pulito, senior, said.

When it was time for the judging run, the students were pin-drop silent, as all eyes were on the machine. The students had only two attempts to run their machine as smoothly as possible. Their creation, equipped with its very own Monopoly board, gumdrop mountain and Lego castle, faced a few complications, but overall finished strong. “Rube (Goldberg) was a good reminder that when you work hard, you can be happy, no matter the outcome,” Sarah McCarthy, senior, said.

Although they did not place, the students acknowledge their efforts as a success.“The Rube Goldberg process is extremely rewarding,” Mr. Sivanich said. “As with any significant collaborative experience, it provides the opportunity for great personal learning and growth for both the students and for me. I think we all learned a lot about each other and ourselves, and we were able to establish a number of strong and meaningful relationships. At the end of the day, these are the things that are the most important.”

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