IRVINE : No Job Too Easy for Student Engineers

The task was simple, but with some help from a troll doll, a large rat trap, a dentist’s drill, some pool balls and a number of other items, engineering student Jeff Long devised a pretty complicated way to pop a balloon.

And complication was the key to winning the annual Rube Goldberg engineering contest Tuesday at UC Irvine, where simple tasks like popping balloons aren’t supposed to be so simple.

“Easy task, complicated machine,” said student Ramin Massoumi, summarizing the purpose of the contest in which contestants vied for the most complicated way to pop a balloon. “That’s basically what it is.”

The contest, named after the late cartoonist who specialized in drawing ingenious, unnecessarily complicated inventions to accomplish trivial ends, comes as part of the university’s 21st annual Engineering Week, otherwise known as E-Week.

Highlights of the week include the always-messy egg drop competition, the infamous nerd contest and chances for students to learn more about careers in engineering.

Attendance was low for the usually popular Rube Goldberg contest. This surprised organizers, given that first prize was a Toshiba computer, followed by $200 for second and $100 for third.

But the event didn’t lack ingenuity.

Long, a senior electrical engineering major, walked away with first place for his contraption, which he created over the weekend. The elaborate chain reaction that ultimately popped a hanging blue balloon started when a small, battery-operated toy car bumped a purple-haired troll doll into rat trap, which unleashed a bucket and sparked a dentist’s drill. And that was only the half of it.

“It’s neat,” Long said of the contest. “It makes you think how to use what you’ve got.”

Richard Kekahuna, a senior aerospace engineering major, took second place for his device, which sent a toy rocket and X-Acto knife onto a waiting red balloon.

Mark Pontius, a senior electrical engineering student, entered at the last minute when he realized there were only two contestants. While he quickly assembled a contraption using his backpack, a skateboard and a toy car rigged with a nail on a race track, it was a swift stomp with his foot that finally popped a stubborn balloon.

Said an amused Pontius of his $100-winning device: “It’s pretty good wages for a starting engineer.”