Events
Innovative Engineering Competition Challenges the Mind
Students Demonstrate Creative Ways to Pop a Balloon
RALEIGH, N.C. (April 6, 2024) – Working long hours to deliver a product that satisfies stringent requirements for functionality and cost through the application of basic scientific principles is all in a day's work for engineers – and for students in Wake Tech's EGR-150: Intro to Engineering course.
Each semester, students design and build a Rube Goldberg machine that can perform the simple task of popping a balloon in a not-so-simple way. The event takes place at the end of each Fall and Spring semester.
Featuring more than 200 students in the Associate in Engineering program organized into 48 teams, the latest edition of the Rube Goldberg Competition took place Saturday at the Southern Wake Campus. Students had to design and build an intricate machine that, once started, would run autonomously and progress through a minimum of five distinct steps that applied various principles of physics – gravity, force, mechanics, magnetism, sound waves, light and/or electricity – and end with the popping of a balloon. Students also had to incorporate safety features, keep within certain dimensions and meet budget requirements.
As part of the project, students also documented the engineering design process through key phases of brainstorming, sketching the design, submitting a design proposal and review, building the machine, testing and redesigning as needed, conducting an oral team presentation and writing the final competition results report.
The projects were judged by local professionals, industry partners and Wake Tech engineering alumni. Top honors went to the following teams:
- 1st Place: Digital Cougars (Luis Aleman-Escamilla, John Crone, David George and Kevin Paye)
- 2nd Place: Skunk Works (Anton Berezhnyi, Tyler Campos, Luca Hayes and Ethan Whoolery)
- 3rd Place: Patent Pending (Sam Abu-Jaradeh, Daniel Bresolin, Noah Laney and Prin Nekkanti)
Each winning team took home a cash prize.
The Rube Goldberg Competition is the final project for students taking Intro to Engineering. It teaches them to apply STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) concepts to real-world projects and develop team-building skills. Students pursuing the Associate in Engineering degree are planning to transfer to four-year institutions to earn bachelor's degrees in engineering.
The semiannual event is named for Rube Goldberg, a Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist and engineer whose work depicts elaborate contraptions of levers, pulleys, wheels and gears completing simple, everyday tasks.
