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Students from area technical high schools brought their Rube Goldberg machines to the Storrs campus last weekend to demonstrate their creative, if unwieldy, solutions to this year’s nationwide challenge, Zip a Zipper. Helping them were undergraduates in UConn’s Engineering Ambassadors program and graduate students in the UConn GK-12 program (Graduate STEM Fellows in K-12 Education).

The event was held in the ITE Building on March 8, during National Engineers Week.

Rube Goldberg was a cartoonist, engineer, and inventor best known for his cartoons depicting contraptions devised to perform simple tasks in convoluted ways.

UConn has hosted the Rube Goldberg contest, part of an annual nationwide challenge, for the past three years. The event is one example of the University’s outreach initiatives to foster interest in the STEM disciplines among K-12 students, thereby creating a ‘pipeline’ for future STEM students at UConn.