Philadelphia’s Pig Iron Theatre will revive a Rube Goldberg machine contest this spring

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The Philadelphia Contraption Contest, coming in April, teaches kids that life is complicated.

Sometimes, needlessly so.

So why not have some fun with it?

The contest asks middle school students to design machines that complete a simple task in as convoluted a manner as possible. Known as Rube Goldberg machines, the contraptions in this contest must ultimately ring a bell, as a nod to the Liberty Bell and America’s 250th birthday.

“Being in Philly with the semiquincentennial, the proposal is it has to ring a bell, basically like the Liberty Bell,” said Dan Rothenberg, co-creator of the experimental performance company Pig Iron Theatre, which is sponsoring the contest.

“Doesn’t have to be the Liberty Bell, but that’s our semiquincentennial tie-in,” he said.

The creator of the contest, Victor Fiorillo, said the machines will be judged for their Rube Goldbergian properties.

“Complexity, completion of the task, absurdity,” said Fiorillo, whose day job is writing for Philadelphia Magazine. “Rube Goldberg machines are based on the cartoons of Rube Goldberg and those cartoons were always funny. So, humor is part of this.”

Even if these whimsical and not always structurally sound machines fail their main objective, points are given for enthusiasm.

“Maybe there’s a machine that just can’t complete the task, but the teamwork shown by the team is so over the top,” Fiorillo said. “That might be a teamwork award.”

Fiorillo is asking middle school teams to register for the contest by Dec. 18 to secure a spot next spring. He says he can accommodate 10 to 12 teams. Winners will receive a cash prize of $250, $500 and $1,000 for their school for third, second and first place, respectively.

The Philadelphia Contraption Contest is independent and not associated with the official Rube Goldberg Machine Contest, which is held by the Rube Goldberg Institute for Innovation and Creativity. Winners in Philly will not qualify to advance to the national rounds of that contest.

The 2026 event marks the return of the Contraption Contest, which Fiorillo created a decade ago but has been dormant for several years.

“Like so many things, this got shut down by COVID, and I put it on the backburner,” he said. “Then Dan from Pig Iron calls me and says, ‘You remember that Ruth Goldberg machine thing you used to do? Let’s do it.’”

Rothenberg wanted to revive the contest because last summer Pig Iron expanded into children’s theater with its premiere of “Franklin’s Key,” a play about clever kids who use science and magic to uncover buried secrets about Benjamin Franklin’s legacy.

Doubling down on young people’s capacity for science and imagination, Rothenberg offered to sponsor the return of the Contraption Contest and take over its logistics.

“This fundamental tag line of executing a task in the most complicated way possible has a humor and a delight and a theatricality that appeals to so many people,” he said.

Rube Goldberg began drawing absurd mechanical inventions in 1912 and they were an instant hit. The term “Goldbergian” first appeared in print in 1915. That Goldbergian spirit continues to thrive today on social media.

Rothenberg said their appeal is fundamentally human.

“I think the reason we’re drawn to Rube Goldberg machines is because we all feel that we’re caught in a system that we can’t see the beginning of, we can’t see the end of and that generates an unexpected outcome,” he said.

“With so many things in our lives we’re like, ‘Well, that didn’t need to be so complicated,’” he said.