Rube Goldberg Machine - Competitions

Competitions

In early 1987, Purdue University in Indiana started the annual National Rube Goldberg Machine Contest, organized by the Phi Chapter of Theta Tau, a national engineering fraternity. In 2009, the Epsilon Chapter of Theta Tau established a similar annual contest at the University of California, Berkeley.

Since around 1997, the kinetic artist Arthur Ganson has been the emcee of the annual "Friday After Thanksgiving" (FAT) competition sponsored by the MIT Museum in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Teams of contestants construct elaborate Rube Goldberg style chain-reaction machines on tables arranged around a large gymnasium. Each apparatus is linked by a string to its predecessor and successor machine. The initial string is ceremonially pulled, and the ensuing events are videotaped in closeup, and simultaneously projected on large screens for viewing by the live audience. After the entire cascade of events has finished, prizes are then awarded in various categories and age levels. Videos from several previous years' contests are viewable on the MIT Museum website.

On Food Network's TV show "Challenge", competitors in 2011 were once required to create a Rube Goldberg machine out of sugar.

One of the events in Science Olympiad involves students building a Rube Goldberg-like device to perform a certain series of tasks.

In 2012 April, the Bosch company hosted an event in Hungary, called the "Playground of Engineers" where the participant teams had to do a series of tasks where they collected coins. Later that day the main achievement was to build an overly complex Goldberg Machine which goal was to switch on a car dashboard. The teams were able to buy additional items of their collected coins above the standard issue equipment to make their machine more complicated. The main viewpoint of the judges was the complexity, the operating time and to use up more components.