Wantagh HS Students Place First at Rube Goldberg Competition

A team of science superstars from placed first in the Rube Goldberg Machine Contest Regional Competition, held at Garden City's Cradle of Aviation Museum earlier this month.

Wantagh was one of 10 teams from surrounding states that participated in the contest, which challenged students to create a mechanical device that would inflate and pop a balloon. Team Wantagh, or the “Baker’s Dozen, Plus 2” as they referred to themselves, followed a theme of “Fun in the Kitchen” to secure their win.

It was the second year in a row that the Wantagh team at the regional level. The team is currently preparing for the national competition, which will be held in Michigan next month.

According to Webster’s New World Dictionary, Rube Goldberg is a comically involved, complicated invention, laboriously contrived to perform a simple operation, and was coined after a Pulitzer Prize winning cartoonist, sculptor and author known for inspiring engineers and scientists across the world. The contest began in 1988 and gains in popularity every year.