Today I attended the annual National Rube Goldberg Machine Contest finals at Purdue University. This year the task was to make a hamburger in no less than 20 steps, and the Purdue Armory was full of great, laboriously contrived burger-making machines.
I had the opportunity to interview quite a few of the participants, so look forward to a video piece on these makers (from both the high school and college competitions) and their machines in action once we get that edited together. For more pictures, you can check out my flickr set of the event.
16 thoughts on “National Rube Goldberg Machine Contest 2008”
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Please post video of the machine!
great stuff mike, thanks for doing this!
Is there a video of the winning entry?
nice, rtfm for video functionality of your cam for next year ;/ stills still better than nothing though, thanks
Here is the link … http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q8DjQ2DXs7s
re: Is there a video of the winning entry?
Here’s a piece that Purdue did of the regionals:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=q8DjQ2DXs7s
What they show there is essentially the winning entry, since Purdue won yesterday’s national competition as well.
@sam: I was there with a couple of videographer buddies and they had two video cameras on every official run of the machines in the college division. As I said above, “look forward to a video piece on these makers (from both the high school and college competitions) and their machines in action once we get that edited together.” We were reviewing the footage last night, and there’s some choice stuff, not just of the machines, but of the sweet people behind them. Your patience will be rewarded.
Video on my lil’ cam wouldn’t have done them justice, and as you can see in the Purdue footage linked above, even then, those things are really hard to follow. In addition to our cameras, we’ll be getting the B-roll from the Purdue jib arm camera.
this is so cool. reminds me of back to the future 1, 2 and 3. I still prefer my burgers being hand made and all but this is a new step forward. I just don’t want to imagine a future world where machines do everything. Plant rice, pluck out potatoes, cook fries etc…. it looks too much like iRobot/matrix like.
But this is cool!
Fara – http://ww.pickmeuptoday.com
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Q4fTPwXy4U