Rube Goldberg Machine Contest highlights Boilermaker values in College of Engineering
The whir of small motors working overtime.
The sonic pop of a giant pink balloon.
The plink of kibble hitting a metal bowl.
The roar of cheers and thunder of applause.
By the sounds echoing through the Purdue Armory alone, the Rube Goldberg Machine Contest World Championship on March 29, 2025, was a success. The contest is in its 36th year, but 2025 marked the addition of “World Championship” to the title.
Twenty-eight teams competed across four divisions to feed a pet, a task they had been preparing for since August 2024. Each team stood to take home a variety of prizes, from a $2,500 check and first-place trophy to a plaque for funniest themed skit or for perseverance in the face of major machine breakage.
Machine breakages are fairly common, since Rube Goldberg machines are made from everyday objects and are tested in three rounds, called runs, of competition. Teams have about 15 minutes in between each run to give their devices tune-ups so it runs more independently, avoiding additional “interventions,” or human touches to keep the process going.
For Purdue alumnus Zach Umperovitch, host of Contraption Masters and the contest itself, machines malfunctioning and the creators having to intervene is one of his favorite parts.
“A failure at the beginning allows for positive growth,” he said. “It allows (a team) to problem solve between the runs, which is the spirit and the heart of this contest. It's not about perfect runs. It is about problem solving and seeing a machine that maybe doesn't work so great the first run work later. That's a magic moment.”
Plenty of magical contraptions awaited judges and spectators across the elementary, middle school, high school and adult divisions. The free event included West Lafayette mayor Erin Easter; Jennifer George, granddaughter of Rube Goldberg; Arvind Raman, the John A. Edwardson Dean of the College of Engineering; and illustrator Ed Steckley.
Across all divisions, the magic moment of a good run was well-earned. A high school team called The Abductors from Oldenburg, Indiana, found that a quick tweak to their machine in a practice run caused a slew of new malfunctions across the course, including the parts they had considered most stable. So they glued on new miniature fence rails to keep their marbles on track, right before their first round.
The first round had five human interventions. But the team knew they could make it better in the 15 minutes they had between rounds.
While Umperovitch narrated the other competitors’ creations through the rounds, The Abductors got to work improving every place possible: They reglued tracks, resituated strings and pushed switches closer together so that the fan, which had tripped up the flow in two rounds, successfully turned on in the third round.
By the end of the high school division’s competition, The Abductors celebrated a round with only two human interventions.
The same number the Boilermaker Rube Goldberg Team, founded in 1998, had in their best runs of the adult division.
The double-decker saloon-themed contraption fed a sand worm, made from an expandable pet tube, in 120 steps. One hundred of those steps fell within a near-simultaneous chain reaction that included a saloon exploding after a table toppled a box of dynamite, the abduction of a cow by UFO and a collapsing of a popsicle-stick railroad track. It was extravagant and functional, which earned the Boilermaker Rube Goldberg Team first place in the adult division.
The team, with students whose majors vary from engineering to agriculture and art, walked away with five awards in total: the people’s choice award, voted by spectators online and on-site through Zach’s Contraptions; best final step, for the dramatic sand worm launch; the artistry award, for atmospheric greatness; and the most hilarious award, for the three skits performed by team members to give life to the saloon.
The Purdue American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME) team placed second with a Seuss-themed delivery of green eggs and ham to its pet. The ASME team prepared a robust poem to open the act and meticulously prepared for each run, unabashedly using human intervention when required to get the meal to Max, the dog from “How the Grinch Stole Christmas.”
Both were true displays of what makes Purdue engineers resilient, creative, patient and resourceful team players: Each contraption took almost eight months to complete and had only 15 minutes to tweak in between each run.
“Boilermaker Engineering is about aiming big,” Raman said in his opening remarks. “It’s about the giant leap. It’s about creativity. It’s about teamwork. It’s about having fun, let’s not forget about that. Fun is a very important part of engineering. It’s about failing, but persevering. All of those here today have demonstrated those Boilermaker values in spades today.”
Other winning themes included carrots passed to a rabbit via roller coaster, an intergalactic gas station and a school-themed setup that “fed” a student a pie to the face. The room regularly burst into cheers, applause and laughter, especially from George.
“Rube never built these machines, he was terrible at building everything,” George said in her closing remarks. “He just drew them and imagined them. He would be gobsmacked that everyone here today was building machines like the ones he drew.”
The excitement continued as the 2026 contest’s theme, “Open a Box,” was announced at the conclusion of awards. The 2026 contest will be held on May 16 at the Tippecanoe County Fairgrounds.
