2006 Rube Goldberg Machine Contest

The 11th annual Rube Goldberg Machine Contest for high school students will be held this Friday, February 24. The contest is named after Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist Reuben Lucius Goldberg, who is famous for his "Invention" satirical cartoon drawings of exceptionally complex machines built to perform simple, everday tasks. The national 2006 challenge is to build a machine that can individually cut or shred five sheets of 8 1/2 inch by 11 inch, 20-pound paper and place the shredded paper into a recycle bin in at least 20 steps. The competition between up to 12 high school teams will be held at the Chicago Children's Museum Navy Pier. The winning team will win a number of goodies, including a traveling trophy to display until 2007 and the opportunity to display their machine at the national collegiate Rube Goldberg Machine Contest at Purdue University on April 1. You can see a video from 2005 high school contest here. The high school Rube Goldberg competition is being sponsored by Argonne National Laboratory.