BBs, Ball Bearings and a Bicycle Gear:
Inside the Winning Rube Goldberg Team

by Gail Cowan

What would it take for you to change the batteries in your flashlight and turn it on?

The Rube Goldberg Team from Chicago's Morgan Park Academy started planning how to do that right after Thanksgiving. It took them nearly three months – but then they had to engineer and build an enormously complicated and inefficient Rube Goldberg device built in four separate components and run by water, ball bearings, a bicycle gear, a handful of Legos and a jug of BBs.

All that work paid off when the team took first place for the third consecutive year at the regional Rube Goldberg contest sponsored by Argonne National Laboratory and then the state championship sponsored by Argonne and the University of Illinois.

The winning device was designed as a giant “Mission to Mars” with the flashlight standing in for the Mars landing module that needs to be refueled before returning to Earth. The ball bearings represent “radio signals” that tell the module to dump its payload, refuel and get into position for the return trip.

So how does a team of six high school students manage to win three regional contests in a row?

Some of the credit goes to their teacher and advisor, Larry “Doc” Brown and his wife Nancy. Their basement on the southwest side of Chicago was where they designed and constructed the machine. Doc and Nancy actually gave the boys keys to their home so that they could come and go as needed. Nancy clearly loves to be part of the process. Besides providing moral support, she makes occasional pizza runs to nourish the young engineers.

“ I hear it because the BBs are forever falling,” Nancy said, “and there's lots of balls rolling, and there's a lot of noise coming up from the basement, but to go down then watch it and see what all this noise is creating is really an amazing thing to see.”

Some of the team members have worked together for four years. The team is made up of Chris Brewin, Dan Cullina, Joe Gradle, Kevin Larson, Steve Marovitch and Ryan Rasmussen. Four of the boys are seniors, one is a junior and one is a sophomore.

“ We work pretty well together,” said team spokesman Dan Cullina. We all know what we're good at, and we all know how to work independently but still check up on each other so we know that everything we're doing is going to fit together right, and that's come with all the experience we've had.”

The most difficult part of the project, the boys said, was finding a way to keep the flashlight perfectly upright so that the Lego claw could grab the top of it, unscrew it and then screw it on again to actually light the flashlight.

Going into each stage of the competition means uncovering new problems, tweaking and perfecting the device, and gearing themselves up for the pressure and the judging.

“ There are still things we are improving about the machine, but as long as every time we have a problem, we know what we can do to fix it, we can still be confident.” Dan said.

“ Doc” is with them every step of the way, giving advice and suggestions on the design and construction, transporting the device and sharing the boys' nervousness and reveling in their triumphs.

One of the boys describes the experience of each competition as “adrenaline in buckets.”

“ If you have a choice between good and lucky, choose lucky,” Doc said recalling his experience watching as the judges approach another device at a recent competition. “That thing wouldn't run. Here come the judges and it won't run -- and here come the judges [to the Morgan Park device] and it ran! First time, and then reset – it ran again!”

Argonne Director Robert Rosner summed up why Argonne sponsors this contest when he awarded the trophy to the Morgan Park team. “Scientists and engineers actually have a great time. It's our great secret that we just have a lot of fun doing what we're doing, and this is a public way to demonstrate that, and I think what you did is just terrific.”

Most of the boys are focused on science and engineering as career goals, but Ryan Rasmussen, like Rube Goldberg, is focused on art school.

Rasmussen described what the contest is like for him, “Rube Goldberg is pretty much imagination taking form. It's all up to you, and by doing this, I'm pretty much exercising that brain muscle right there.”