Riverhead High School students took third place in a Long Island regional contest that teamed up science and fun.
On Saturday, five teams for Riverhead High School competed in the Long Island Regional Rube Goldberg Competition at the Cradle of Aviation Museum in Garden City.
Students prepared in advance for the annual invention-making competition.
Pulitzer Prize winning cartoonist, sculptor and artist Rube Goldberg was best known for his inventions. According to the Merriam World Dictionary definition given on the Rube Goldberg website, a Rube Goldberg is "a comically involved, complicated invention, laboriously contrived to perform a simple operation."
Rube Goldberg competitions have become popular in high schools; in December, Riverhead High School held its third annual Rube Goldberg competition. The goal of the student-created projects was to make a hammer hit a nail as the final act in a process that involved at least 20 steps.
On Saturday, Riverhead’s teams competed against teams from all over Long Island and New York City, and one of the teams, the "Big Bang Theory," placed third.
Team members included Aakash Gandhi, Brianne Corwin, Joann Yeung and Karla Vanston.
The goal of this year's projects was to make a hammer hit a nail as the final act in a process that involved at least 20 steps; teams were coached by Riverhead High School science teacher Gregory Wallace.
For two years in a row, Riverhead High School teams have placed second and third in the regional contest.
