… and St. Olaf College won the annual Rube Goldberg Machine contest.
The annual competition aims to bring to life Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist Rube Goldberg’s drawings of complicated machines and gadgets that accomplish simple tasks. Using as many whimsical, counterintuitive steps as possible, the machines must complete a task determined each year by contest organizers.
This year’s task was to replace an incandescent light bulb with a more energy-efficient light-emitting design, and the Oles designed a machine that broke a light bulb and replaced it with 150 light-emitting diodes (LEDs) that spell out “St. Olaf.” They began working on the machine in September as part of a course taught by Assistant Professor of Physics Jason Engbrecht, and devoted thousands of hours — and almost every weekend this semester — to preparing it for competition.
… Team members built a record player from scratch that, as it spins, allows lasers to fire through pre-drilled holes. The lasers are picked up by light sensors, which trigger several other steps and eventually enable a gate to open and release a ball.
The team also constructed a Gauss rifle, a mechanism that uses a magnetic chain reaction to launch a metal ball at a very high speed, and a simple harmonic oscillator, a system that employs simple harmonic motion and magnetic induction to trigger the start of a car moving along a track. They even turned an ice auger into an Archimedes’ screw that caught pool balls and took them from the machine’s lower level to an elevated track…
March 29th, 2009 at 12:20PM
That is pure awesome. St Olaf has a fun video about their team at . Sounds like they did it for the love of the thing, not to get a job or even just prove their coolness.
March 29th, 2009 at 12:21PM
bah, comments ate my url. http://fusion.stolaf.edu/news/index.cfm?fuseaction=NewsDetails&id=4587 ?
March 29th, 2009 at 2:49PM
[Mine may have gotten eaten by the spam filter also. I repost it because I think there’s potential here for a new kind of organization, which UD could form just by documenting clever and intelligent college competitions, like the one in this post. It could become a Clever Collegiate Competition Association (or something), with UD as czarina, eventually surpassing Miles Brand in influence.]
Stories like this are really encouraging — they give me hope that the natural competitive spirit can be cultivated by universities in an intelligent and constructive way. If university leaders would pay more attention to this sort of thing rather than to the Notoriously Corrupt Athletic Association, the world would be a better place.
Here are some more examples:
– A world chess championship sponsored by the University of Malaya
– A fierce spelling bee at Princeton ("What the hell is a kinkajou?")
– An international scrabble tournament at the University of Malaya (they know how to do it right).
– The Chariots of Fire foot-race at Cambridge University, in which the participants *pay* to run, with the proceeds going to charity.
I’d be pleased to heard of similar examples, in particular ones that cost almost no money and that can be made into inter-university or inter-college competitions, and that may be given some intellectual and/or historical content.
Perhaps UD would like to start an open post and assemble a list, to illustrate the positive things universities could do to replace of the existing corrupt sports regime? If sports corruption is to be eliminated, a positive replacement must be already in hand; UD could be the focal point for developing such replacements.
March 30th, 2009 at 11:28AM
Sounds like a lot of great physics here.
Go Oles. (I say this as a former instructor at the non-Lutheran college in Northfield.)