By: James Schenke
PSPE won its second consecutive Rube Goldberg Machine Contest national championship. From left are: Jordan Vallejo, Rebecca Russell, Andrew Rawlins, and John Stimac. (Photo provided by PSPE)
The PSPE machine used 72 steps recounting a typical day in the life of the cartoonist to accomplish this year's assigned task, erase a chalkboard.
Team president Jordan Vallejo, a junior from Los Angeles, said she was worried that the machine would not finish in the top three after failing to run perfectly on either of its two runs. Some components broke the night before leaving for Columbus, Ohio, for the event. The team stayed up late making repairs.
"We pushed the boundaries on the number of steps and tried to do things that have never been done before," Vallejo said. "In a competition like this, as an engineer you learn the difference between ideal situations and real-world situations."
The PSPE team has won four national championships in the past 10 years and holds a Guinness world record that is unbreakable under new rules meant to curb the 300-step machines PSPE previously created. Under new rules encouraging humor, PSPE won the award for "funniest step."
In a feat never accomplished in three decades of national competition, Purdue also won second place, with a team from the College of Technology's Association of Mechanical and Electrical Technologists. In their first year of national competition the team achieved a perfect run with its haunted classroom theme. The team also won "best step" with its Ghostbusters-inspired green slime that wiped the board clean.
Purdue Rube Goldberg machines have appeared on several national TV programs, most recently in 2014 on "Jimmy KimmelLive!" Watch that machine below.
Source Purdue