Seaside physics class shows imagination beyond belief”I don’t know if it’s going to be fine,” Hazel Owens says.

A fake parrot is duct-taped on her shoulder and her fingers and neck are adorned with chunky costume jewelry.

“Remember last time? There was too much slack.”

The Seaside High School senior makes minor adjustments to a string, which is attached to a piece of wood, on top of which is a yellow golf ball.

Then all heck breaks loose. There’s a whirring, clinking, splashing and clanking and a “Rube Goldberg 2004” sign lights up.

Another “Pirate Island” member set the whole contraption off in an attempt to affix a buccaneer to a wooden boat.

LORI ASSA – The Daily Astorian

“I want to see this thing work,” says Ashley Mersereau determinedly, as she resets her group’s machine, that was having problems with a mousetrap trigger Tuesday evening.The group lets out a collective groan then expertly resets the triggers.

It’s the 10th annual SHS Physics Class Rube Goldberg Competition, and 29 students at Gearhart School are making last-minute adjustments to their contraptions before the judges come around.

The goal is to light up a “Rube Goldberg 2004” sign using the most inefficient means possible.

Last year, the goal was to set off a vinegar and baking soda volcano. The year before, students raised a flag up a flagpole, and the year before that they opened a can of pop.

“They’re learning a lot of design engineering principals,” physics teacher Mike Brown says, as balloons pop and water dribbles in the background. “…And it’s a chance to show off creativity.”

Born in 1883, Reuben Goldberg was notorious for making a simple task exceedingly complex, whether it was buttering a slice of bread or setting a golf ball on a tee. Originally an engineering graduate, the Pulitzer Prize winner drew cartoons that satirized 20th century machines.

Goldberg’s spirit lives on in competitions across the country where engineers of all abilities vie for the most absurd way to use technology.

In this high school competition, projects are judged on artistic merit, complexity and inefficiency, quality of construction and the manual explaining the project.

The contraptions are required to have 12 or more steps, and stretch no farther than four feet in length or width, and reach no farther than five feet high.

The rest is left up to students.

“Ours is kind of cool,” Owens says. “We sink a boat with marbles. We have buried treasure all over, and a bag of gold sets off our light.”

Owens says her group was heavily influenced by “Pirates of the Caribbean.”

Senior Caroline Park helped craft “Arubea” (a-RUBE-a), a Hawaiian-themed contraption.

Sand pours into a wheel, which spins and coils up a rope, releasing Ken up a tree where he knocks a ball down a tube, which hits a mousetrap, sending a car down a ramp, which pops a balloon, which drops some screws, which causes a sign to light up.

Ashley See, right, and Megan Walgren work quickly to set their “Around the World” themed machine before they present it to judges The machine used such landmarks as Mt. Everest, the Statue of Liberty and the Great Wall of China.

LORI ASSA-Daily AstorianIt works perfectly for the judges, but that wasn’t always the case.

“Sometimes things just wouldn’t turn out like they looked on paper,” Park says. “It seemed like every time we showed a new person it would malfunction.”

“Child’s Play,” which uses a twirling ballerina to start the chain reaction, doesn’t perform as its group members had hoped.

“We had some issues with the balloons,” Ashley Mersereau says. “We ran out and bought more and they don’t work the same.”

She adds that there is also too much weight in the teeter-totter so it won’t release.

The bowling-themed project also runs into difficulties.

“It worked fine before,” Josh McCord says. “You just have to look the other way.”

As the contraptions go off, students sigh with the relief of success or moan with disappointment.

They started designing the projects in early December, and for some, it’s been a long haul.

“The last couple weeks, it was four to six hours a day sometimes,” says Pirate Island dad David Robinson. “I know. We fed them dinner.”

Robinson says parents weren’t too involved, although they did run intervention sometimes, emptying out the lamps to look for the proper voltage light bulb, then dashing to the hardware store when Plan A failed.

The students say building the Goldberg contraptions, a project that constitutes 10 percent of their physics grades, has been a good experience.

“You learn a lot about teamwork and how to drill holes without killing ourselves,” says Kristen Thoennes, who worked on “Pirate Island.”

She says the competition among groups makes the event even more fun. Since everyone has been friends since grade school, “espionage” isn’t a problem.

After all the groups display their aptitudes in inefficiency, Brown and several judges confer to determine the 2004 winner.

“Arubea” comes in second.

“Pirate Island” takes first place.

Thoennes starts disassembling pirate booty and marbles to haul home.

Winning wasn’t first on her list of priorities.

“I was just relieved that it worked,” she says.