Chutes, pulleys, mousetraps, slides, wheels and movies. You name it, the Rube Goldberg Club has it all.
The goal of a Rube Goldberg machines is to complete a simple task in as many steps as possible. With the world championship competition approaching, Brendan Favo, president of the Rube Goldberg Club, said the group is shooting for the maximum of 75 steps as the goal.
Because the Rube Goldberg Club is made of students in both engineering and design, Favo, senior in design, said he believes this will add more value to the machine’s aesthetics, as well as construction.
“We feel that because we are both engineers and designers — this is primarily an engineering contest —so we feel that by having the designers, we have an advantage over the competition,” he said.
The team also aims to develop nostalgia for classic Hollywood movies. Each box in the machine incorporates a different classic Hollywood movie scene with a link to the next step in the machine.
The machine recreates scenes like the lightening strike from “Back to the Future” that returns Marty McFly to present time, followed by “The Dark Knight” scene that crashes a car to trigger the semi truck flip scene.
Other movies featured in the machine include “Up,” “King Kong,” “The Great Escape,” “Indiana Jones” and “Harry Potter.”
The group spends numerous hours each week to make each scene perform up to standard, and members continue to make adjustments and improvements to create a smooth-working machine
The club also plans to install speakers at the bottom of the project to enhance the quality and character of each scene, as well as the piece as a whole.
Favo said the toughest challenge the group faces is finding time and the supplies required to move on with the project.
The complete story, written by Claire Norton, can be read at the Iowa State Daily.
Read more about the club in the Ames Tribune.