March 11, 2013

The Future of Rube Goldberg Competitions

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estimated reading time: 3 minutes and 23 seconds.

Purdue University will apparently no longer be the host for the finals of the Rube Goldberg competition. This was not a unanimous decision by the folks who run the competition. It appears that the Theta Tau fraternity, which has a long history of fund raising for Rube Goldberg, and Jennifer George from Rube Goldberg, Inc. disagree about the future of the competition.

Their disagreements revolve around two points. First, they don’t want Purdue to have an unfair “home court” advantage built into the finals every year. I suppose there’s some merit to that. Second, Rube Goldberg, Inc. wants to expand the competition to support more art and storytelling, which is a laudable goal. Frankly, I would also add that it appears they are just generically more interested in running the competition now than they were back when Theta Tau revived it in the early 1980s. As a Purdue student, I competed in Rube Goldberg, and I sincerely hope that all parties involved are able to come to some mutual agreement about this.

I don’t have any inside information here, but I do have some skin in the game. Disagreements in the management of creative problem solving competitions bother me. I competed in the Odyssey of the Mind competition from middle school through high school. My teams twice went to the World Finals, where one of them won a Rantra Fusca Award. Shortly after I graduated, the for-profit company behind the competition started making decisions that upset many of the volunteers that actually did most of the management and operations of the competition. These volunteers eventually broke off to create a separate organization, called Destination Imagination, which is effectively the spiritual successor to the competition I knew as Odyssey of the Mind. Looking back now, I suppose you would have to say that both OM and DI are successful, but that was anything but clear in the immediate aftermath of the breakup.

Both of the points Green makes in the article are important, valid concerns. Moving the location of the finals not only avoids the appearance of a bias or advantage favoring Purdue, but also provides an opportunity to advertise the competition. Though I don’t think there was any ill intent, it certainly felt a little wrong for a fraternity so deeply involved in the finances for the competition to actually compete in it. Still, if you look at the history of this competition, Theta Tau effectively saw something important and put their time, energy, and money into Rube Goldberg when very few others would. If they hadn’t, then I likely would never have had the opportunity to compete.

The lack of art and storytelling was immediately clear to me when I started competing because of the serious contrast between the best high school Odyssey of the Mind teams and the best college Rube Goldberg teams. Quite simply, the high school teams were miles and miles ahead. Worse still, the story was a far more important aspect of the original Rube Goldberg creations than the engineering behind them. Remember: this all started because of cartoons that were telling a story! The competition itself seems to have this entirely backwards in their scoring system. The first step is to revise the scoring system to emphasize points for story as well as steps, which would be a sensitive discussion to have even if there wasn’t some tension between Theta Tau and Rube Goldberg, Inc. about where to host the finals.

Resolving this kind of conflict isn’t easy. Rube Goldberg is a much smaller competition than either Odyssey of the Mind or Destination Imagination, and they may not be able to survive a serious falling out. I would love to see the competition grow, and I like Green’s suggestions. However, I am concerned. This isn’t football. It’s not like there’s a ton of money in organizing and hosting creative problem solving competitions. These things are driven almost entirely by communities of volunteers. I hope that Rube Goldberg, Inc. learns from the OM / DI feud.