AP Physics students compete at Rube Goldberg competition
After 900 hours of hard work, the Rube Goldberg team, which consists of 21 AP Physics C students, traveled to Children’s Museum in Chicago to compete in the 2016 Rube Goldberg Competition.
According to Mr. Paul Sivanich, adviser of the Rube Goldberg team, the goal is to design and build a very complex machine to perform a very ordinary task in the spirit of the Rube Goldberg cartoon strips. This year’s task was to open an umbrella.
“Rube would lose his umbrella in Chicago, and then travel around the world searching for it before finally finding it where he started. The machine was very complex and artfully designed, including more than 60 different steps,” Mr. Sivanich explained. “[Our machine] travels through downtown New York City, Niagara Falls, London, Paris, the Leaning tower of Pisa, the Egyptian Pyramids, Mount Everest, the Great Wall of China, Rio de Janeiro and Antarctica, before finally ending in Chicago to open the umbrella.”
Once the machine was completed, the team traveled to the regional competition. At the competition, there are two runs. According to Mr. Sivanich, the first run went very well, possibly the best the machine had ever run. However, the second run of the machine was not as successful.
“There were new rules that we weren’t prepared for. One of the rules said that we needed to set up our machine in eight minutes, and ours takes at least 20, so we were not fully prepared for the second run,” Allison Rowe, senior, said.
Despite the problems in the second part of the competition, “we accomplished a lot and had lots of fun,” Bridget Woody, senior, said.
“The overall experience was a truly remarkable one. Everyone on the team contributed significantly to its success. There were amazing displays of creativity, problem-solving, teamwork and engineering,” Mr. Sivanich said. “I was especially impressed with the team’s effort and dedication despite their many other commitments. We all got to know each other in a very different environment, and by the end of the project, we had grown very close. This year’s Rube Goldberg was a great experience.”
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