2013 Task
Yes, Purdue University is my alma mater, and I am very proud that the Purdue Society of Professional Engineers team smashed its own Guinness world record for largest Rube Goldberg machine with a 300-step behemoth that flawlessly accomplished the simple task of blowing up and popping a balloon.
If you are not familiar with the Rube Goldberg, it is a contest to build a complicated feat of engineering to perform a very simple task. The contest was named after Rube Goldberg, a United States cartoonist who drew intricate diagrams of very complicated and impractical contraptions that accomplished little or nothing (1883-1970). In this contest (video below), the machine simply had to blow up a balloon and pop it. That’s it.
