Purdue Students Win Rube Goldberg Contest

Dekortage writes "How long does it take to make a burger? Students from Purdue University's Society of Professional Engineers won the 2008 Rube Goldberg contest with a device that requires 156 steps to assemble a burger. According to the team captain, 'We put 4,000 to 5,000 man-hours into this machine since September, and all the hard work has been well worth it.' That's a long time to wait for dinner." Here's a video of the winning entry in operation.

Comments

Re:Geez

[Drewmeister]

If I'm not mistaken, here's an alternate video: YouTubed!

Title in 156 easy steps??

[zappepcs]

Seriously! I thought this country was running out of engineers? Guess we just needed better problems. For anyone interested in a bit of GolDberg fun, try the made-of-Lego Great Ball Contraption http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&output=googleabout&btnG=Search+our+site&q=lego%20gbc
Truly team effort in creating time wasting fun.

Re:whay is "fast food" still so labor-intensive?

[iocat]

Turns out it takes less time and money to have one expert (eg a trained teen-ager) listen to what you want and enter it than it does to have you enter it yourself. A few Arbys in CA tried self-service terminals, but it was so confusing and impersonal they all switched back (or went under).

Re:nice

[i_b_don]

Wow... That's an unbelievability insane statement. Have you ever been to engineering school? Do you know what an engineer does? Engineering is the PRACTICAL use of scientific knowledge. You can learn all the equations in the world but until you actually apply them to BUILD something it's worthless crap filling your mind. You might as well close your school books and go home.

There is no better application in school than doing a project similar to this. Robot building projects and the like were the best thing I ever did in collage and the skills I learned doing them I still carry with me today.

You're crazy to think that this was a waste of time and that we should more emulate China and India with rote memorization of equations. Give me an engineer who can build something any day of the week.

d