JCD seniors compete in national competition
Josh Barnett - Sports Editor

Did you ever think punching a ballot was simple? If you said yes, you are right. It's not supposed to be difficult, but in this year's Rube Goldberg Competition, difficult was the name of the game.

What's the Rube Goldberg Competition?

It's a competition where high school students enter a contraption they have constructed which makes a simple task difficult. This year the contraptions were to make marking a ballot difficult in twenty steps or more. The idea came from a cartoonist in the 1950's named Reuben Lucius Goldberg who always had a contraption in his cartoons that made a simple task difficult.

This year's competition was in Milwaukee, Wisconsin on Friday, April 30, and was hosted by the Milwaukee Colleges of Engineering Partnership, Marquette University, Milwaukee School of Engineering and the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.

Three students from Jac-Cen-Del High School constructed a contraption and entered it in the multi-state competition in Milwaukee. The students involved were seniors Michael
Busch, Adam Thole and Kyle Luers, along with math and computer sci
ence teacher Paul Thole, who was the team leader.
In the competition, the contraptions are scored by the number of steps it takes to complete the task (minimum 20 steps) and if a human intervenes, points will be deducted. Each team must run the contraption, set it back up and run it again in nine minutes. The JCD project took 43 steps and approximately 50 seconds to finish. Items used to construct the contraption included mousetraps, marbles, balloons, a bicycle wheel and a bowling ball, among others.

Around 40 schools in all traveled to Milwaukee to compete in the multi-
state competition with a chance to advance to the nationals, which were also in Milwaukee.

Jac-Cen-Del was the only local school represented in the competition. They were one of four schools from Indiana to compete. In the multi-state competition, the JCD students won $500 with their second place finish and advanced to the national finals, where they finished in fourth place.

JOSH BARNETT PHOTO

Jac-Cen-Del seniors Michael Busch, Adam Thole and Kyle Luers pose beside the project they recently took second place at the Multi-State Competition of the Rube Goldberg Competition in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. The group, along with their team leader Paul Thole, took their engineering talents to the competition and won $500 for their efforts. Thole is the math and computer science teacher at JCD. They then advanced to the National level where they placed fourth.