Students Learn the Hard Way

On a day when simple just wouldn’t do, Javier Pinasio smiled with pride at his invention: a 4-foot-high contraption with an umbrella and a car stereo that belted out a Britney Spears song when its task was complete.

How else would an engineering student go about opening a 12-ounce can of soda?

Pinasio was among about 30 UC Irvine students who gathered Wednesday for one of the highlights of Engineering Week, a 29-year-old competition that blends ingenuity and a finely tuned sense of humor.

The Rube Goldberg competition--named after the inventor/cartoonist who lampooned man’s inclination to find hard ways to do simple things--challenges students to come up with the most complicated way--if not the worst, one student said--to perform an everyday task.

Students didn’t open the soda can with their fingers or a Swiss Army knife or some fancy gadget from Radio Shack--that would be downright insulting. Instead, they did it with car batteries, a windshield-wiper motor from a 1968 Pontiac Firebird, Popsicle sticks, car stereos and even--in one stroke of genius--gravity.

“The more complicated the better,” said the 23-year-old Pinasio.

“I grew up trying to figure out how things worked, building things, taking things apart. This was so much fun. Built in, like, a day.”

Pinasio and his partner managed to open a can of soda using a 4-foot-high square-framed contraption that, with its umbrella, resembled an early flying machine.

Although the Rube Goldberg competition is the centerpiece of Engineering Week, the five-day science fest offers a range of events testing human and machine.

There is a video game competition, a paper airplane-making contest and--for those who fancy structural engineering--a Popsicle stick bridge-building contest.

But many students said the Rube Goldberg competition is the most exciting and allows engineering students the excuse to take creativity to the extreme.

Creativity Makes the Contest Fun

Arlene Doria, a 22-year-old senior with a double major in chemical engineering and biology, helped Pinasio with the project, including the device that flipped on the Britney Spears jingle when the soft drink was opened.”The creativity behind it is what makes it fun,” she said. “You really can have some fun.”

Tuan Tran didn’t make the cut in the preliminaries this year, thus getting edged out of the $300 first prize that will be awarded Friday.

He said he was dispirited, because he is a senior and this was his last chance.

His contraption, which uses a wooden car that travels down a bridge and a string attached to the car and the pull tab, took three tries to open the can.

When it did open, a crowd of about 20 people cheered.

But Tran knew his run was over.

“Mine just wasn’t complex enough,” he said. “And we had some trouble with the length of the string we needed. The wind also damaged one tube I needed.”

Tran said he will gear up for the paper airplane contest and the Popsicle stick competition.

“I think I have a chance,” he said.