St. Olaf Wins National Rube Goldberg Machine Contest

This year was about retribution.

After failing to place last year, associate professor of physics Jason Engbrecht said his team’s win on Saturday in the 25th national Machine Contest was nothing short of sweet.

“For me, the win was, of course, great,” Engbrecht told Northfield Patch following the competition. “After all of that time, I just wanted the machine to run the way we all knew it could run so the team could get that feeling of showing to a large crowd of people how amazing the machine was.”

The 191-step machine impressed with a flawless run that ended with a balloon being inflated and then popped by a laser.

More impressive is that St Olaf doesn’t have an engineering program and competes against schools with some of the best programs in the nation, including Purdue University, where the event is held each year.

And unlike most of the perennial competitors, Engbrecht’s team starts fresh each year with a new cast of students. This year, 14 of the 16 students traveled to Indiana to compete.

In all, Engbrecht said his team put in approximately 3,500 hours of work on the machine, which was based on the theme of an apocalypse.

St. Olaf won the contest the first year it participated, in 2009, and placed second in 2010.

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