EXCHANGE: Home-schooled team shows engineering creativity
CHAMPAIGN, Ill. (AP) - When you want to make things difficult, this is the perfect team.
In the whole country, no team could make a more complicated engine for performing a task that should be effortless, a concept created by the cartoonist Rube Goldberg.
A local group of home-school students called the Homeschool STEAM Alliance sent four teams (three high school and one junior high) to the national Rube Goldberg Machine Contest tournament.
All four teams advanced to the finals in Lawrenceburg, Ind., for a live display of ingenious yet stupid inventions.
Chores For Change, a junior high school team dressed in blue, won the national title on April 6. And two category awards.
For the wins, they received a $1,000 prize, which a nonprofit can use.
The Chores For Change contestants were Ava Berkey, Jillian Barlow, Sam Boesch, Sam Earles, Cadence Fricke, Olivia Remenji and Miles Remenji.
The two categories are Professor Butts' Creative Spark and Spirit of Hilarious Invention, said Ava, a seventh-grader from Savoy.
Why Professor Butts? His creator, Goldberg, named a comic strip and several clueless inventions after Professor Lucifer Gorgonzola Butts, including the Self-Operating Napkin.
Goldberg was a cartoonist from about a century ago, a career that included winning a Pulitzer Prize for political cartooning in 1948. But this was just one of many talents. He also made seven films in 1916. And he had engineering training, basing Butts on his own professors.
The objective for the machine contest: Put a coin in a piggy bank with a minimum of 10 steps. Chores For Change finishes off the coin with a marble. But you can't use live animals or fire, said Beccy Remenji, a mom and a coach for the Chores For Change team.
The winners readily admit they had some tough competition.
"There were so many other cool machines," said sixth-grader Cadence, who lives in Champaign and plans to become an engineer.
The Chores For Change team built an entire house with such odd features as a pool noodle to un-smoothen the operation.
"My favorite part was the steps," said Sam Boesch, a Champaign sixth-grader who is also considering a career in engineering. "They were hard to make" because of the math involved.
And they also put on a skit, starring a crazy family, a noisy neighbor and a TV crew, at just under the three minutes allowed for the machine's run time.
Miles, a Champaign seventh-grader, said it took teamwork to create 32 steps for a simple task.
Olivia, like her brother a Champaign seventh-grader, said the reward was more than the win.
"It was really fun to work with a team," she said.
Other teams from the area, including the Academy High Owls and Saint Thomas More Science Club, also advanced at the competition.
Coach Remenji's rightly proud of the team, which continues a proud tradition.
"Thirty-one years ago, an engineering team from Purdue University made a Rube Goldberg machine a real thing," the coach said of the competition's history. "It's growing. This year, there were an epic number of teams."
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Source: The (Champaign) News-Gazette, https://bit.ly/2VZhUos
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Information from: The News-Gazette, http://www.news-gazette.com