Waterford teens head to national Rube Goldberg contest

Erasing a chalkboard may be a dying art at high schools, but one campus has taken the task to the max. One absurdly complex machine devised by Waterford High physics students takes 25 steps to clear the board.

They got extra points for being absurdly complex, as well as for a sense of whimsy and diner-inspired touches incorporated into the machine, such as a spoon that acts as a lever to turn on an electric hand mixer holding a duster that wipes the chalkboard.

The Wildcat Diner device, named for the school mascot, won entry to a national engineering competition, the National High School Rube Goldberg Machine Contest. Ely Zavala captains the team, with Eli Rosas, Luis Ceron, Andy Robles and Andrew Salcedo.

“They have to build a machine that accomplishes a simple task in a complicated way. It ties into physics because eventually we will be talking about how the energy exchanges go from one to the next,” explained physics and chemistry teacher Janet Brownell.

Those energy exchanges can be as simple as a ball dropping into a cup, which drags down a string attached to a pulley, and so on.

Anyone who has played a game of Mousetrap knows the anticipation of watching such a chain reaction play out. But making those 30-second series happen takes months of work – at least for the winners. Others scooted by with several weeks of long days and a very late last night, many of the 30 students – six teams – who took part in the Waterford Regional Competition said.

“I got a lot of work experience out of it. I’m going to Grand Canyon University to become an electrical engineer,” said senior Michael Erisma. “Working on these pieces – there’s a deadline you have to have this done and I don’t know how to get there. There is no set way to get from A to B,” he said. “That’s what I’m going to be doing the rest of my life.”

For teammate Ashley Miller, the competition brought insight. “I learned how to work well with people who were difficult to work with. I had to release control,” she said as her teammates laughed. “We’re all very different people, and of course we each thought our design was better than anybody else’s,” Miller said.

They came up with 30 or 40 steps for their “Frozen Few” team machine, eventually trimming the steps to just over 20. Many steps that were just too impractical had to be cut, Erisma said with a sigh. Such as his plan to freeze a wire in a block of ice, hook it to a battery that would heat the wire to melt the ice, which would run into a cup …

The Waterford Rube Goldberg Machine Contest was one of two California meets in the nationwide competition named for the engineer and Pulitzer prize-winning cartoonist Rube Goldberg (1883-1970). Goldberg gained fame with his cartoons of contraptions – elaborate chain reactions of arms, wheels, gears, cups and dozens of other everyday household items.

One Goldberg design took the cotton out of an aspirin bottle. Another ran a self-operating napkin. Last year, his namesake contest asked for machines that zipped a zipper. The year of the swine flu, the goal was to dispense a dollop of hand sanitizer.

The contest tries to capture the Goldberg spirit, asking students to use humor, creativity and teamwork to spend at least 20 steps doing some humdrum job – extra points for using found materials. The national meet is in Pewaukee, Wis., April 18. The team is speaking and giving demonstrations to local civic groups to raise the estimated $5,500 needed for the trip.

This story was originally published March 19, 2015 at 6:16 PM with the headline "Waterford teens head to national Rube Goldberg contest."