UW-Stout team wins national Rube Goldberg competition once again

• University of Wisconsin-Stout

University of Wisconsin-Stout

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MENOMONIE - For the second year in a row, a team from UW-Stout has won the national Rube Goldberg Machine Contest.

Students were challenged to come up with a complicated machine to water plants. And a four-member Stout team came up with “The Westing Estate.” Its theme was a haunted Louisiana mansion – and it churned through 135 steps to actually water plants. Co-captain Andrew Behnke was a part of both Stout championship teams. He said students spent a combined two-thousand hours on the machine, at a cost of around two-thousand dollars. Last year, they came up with a machine with an Egyptian theme which dispensed hand sanitizers in 120 different steps.

The Goldberg contest is named after the famous cartoonist who drew complicated machines to perform easy tasks. Stout’s machine was on display this afternoon at the campus.

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