Judging
Teams of college students arrive at the competition with a tabletop Rube Goldberg machine designed to accomplish the task of the year. The machine must use at least twenty steps and complete the task within two minutes. Students typically choose a theme, often relating to popular films or historical periods.
Sixty percent of the score is based on the machine's ability to finish the task in two out of three attempts. The remaining forty percent of the score comes from the judges' general impressions of the team's theme, teamwork, and "Goldberg spirit". If the machine malfunctions, team members are permitted to manually guide it to the next step; a penalty is assessed for each intervention.
Read more about this topic: Rube Goldberg Machine Contest
Famous quotes containing the word judging:
“If behind the erratic gunfire of the press the author felt that there was another kind of criticism, the opinion of people reading for the love of reading, slowly and unprofessionally, and judging with great sympathy and yet with great severity, might this not improve the quality of his work? And if by our means books were to become stronger, richer, and more varied, that would be an end worth reaching.”
—Virginia Woolf (1882–1941)
“The question is whether they’ve reached a depth
Of desperation that would warrant poetry’s
Leaving love’s alternations, joy and grief,
The weather’s alternations, summer and winter,
Our age-long theme, for the uncertainty
Of judging who is a contemporary liar....”
—Robert Frost (1874–1963)
“The primitive wood is always and everywhere damp and mossy, so that I traveled constantly with the impression that I was in a swamp; and only when it was remarked that this or that tract, judging from the quality of the timber on it, would make a profitable clearing, was I reminded, that if the sun were let in it would make a dry field, like the few I had seen, at once.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)