Chutes, pulleys, mousetraps, slides, wheels and movies. You name it, the Rube Goldberg Club has it all.

The goal of a Rube Goldberg machines is to complete a simple task in as many steps as possible. With the world championship competition approaching, Brendan Favo, president of the Rube Goldberg Club, said the group is shooting for the maximum of 75 steps as the goal.

Because the Rube Goldberg Club is made of students in both engineering and design, Favo, senior in design, said he believes this will add more value to the machine’s aesthetics, as well as construction.

“We feel that because we are both engineers and designers — this is primarily an engineering contest —so we feel that by having the designers, we have an advantage over the competition,” he said.

The team also aims to develop nostalgia for classic Hollywood movies. Each box in the machine incorporates a different classic Hollywood movie scene with a link to the next step in the machine.

The machine recreates scenes like the lightening strike from “Back to the Future” that returns Marty McFly to present time, followed by “The Dark Knight” scene that crashes a car to trigger the semi truck flip scene.

Other movies featured in the machine include “Up,” “King Kong,” “The Great Escape,” “Indiana Jones” and “Harry Potter.”

The group spends numerous hours each week to make each scene perform up to standard, and members continue to make adjustments and improvements to create a smooth-working machine

The club also plans to install speakers at the bottom of the project to enhance the quality and character of each scene, as well as the piece as a whole.

Favo said the toughest challenge the group faces is finding time and the supplies required to move on with the project.

Members fundraise from small businesses, such as Panda Express, and use start-up fundraising cites to reach enough money to operate and create quality scenes for their machine to succeed within the competitions.

Other members of the club said they joined because they feel it is unique and interesting, as well as something competitive and fun to be involved in.

Jeremy Price, who is the club’s CEO and in charge of the engineering side of things, said the competition is not as big as it once was.

“It’s a competition that is slowly diminishing in popularity and … this year, they added an online portion, and that’s where the international part comes in,” Price said. 

Members hope the Rube Goldberg Club will become a growing tradition.

Not only does the club benefit members by allowing creative experimenting, it’s also something to put on résumés. The club encourages team building, relies on problem solving skills and enhances engineering and design skills, Favo said.

Excited about redesigning the Harry Potter portion of the machine, the club has delegated each specific scene to two individuals, in order to provide special attention to each piece.

The Rube Goldberg Club is gearing up all in hopes of succeeding at the official national competition in Columbus, Ohio on March 28.