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:
“But judging by what little of it stands,
Not even the ingenuities of debt
Could save it from its losses being met.”
—Robert Frost (1874–1963)
“One cannot demand of a scholar that he show himself a scholar everywhere in society, but the whole tenor of his behavior must none the less betray the thinker, he must always be instructive, his way of judging a thing must even in the smallest matters be such that people can see what it will amount to when, quietly and self-collected, he puts this power to scholarly use.”
—G.C. (Georg Christoph)
“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)