The Rube Goldberg Machine Contests bring Goldberg's cartoons to life as a way of helping students transcend traditional ways of looking at problems, taking them into the intuitive chaotic realm of imagination. The resulting inventions are collections of bits and pieces, parts of now useless machines, cobbled together to achieve an innovative imaginative, yet somehow logical contraption to meet the annual contest challenge.

For 55 years Goldberg's Pulitzer Prize winning cartoon drawings of complicated machines and gadgets satirized government policies, which he saw as excessive. His cartoons combined simple machines and common household items to create complex wacky and diabolically logical machines that accomplished mundane and trivial tasks. Rube Goldberg is the only proper name included in Webster's Dictionary as an adjective, referring to "accomplishing by extremely complex, roundabout means what seemingly could be done simply."

Previous challenges have included dispensing an appropriate amount of hand sanitizer, watering a plant, replacing an incandescent light bulb with a more energy efficient design, assembling a hamburger, juicing an orange shredding 5 sheets of paper one-by-one, casting a ballot, peeling an apple, and putting a stamp on an envelope.



Purdue University's 2011 Record Setting Rube Machine