Standing around a machine made of wood, plastic tubes, a spatula and an imitation frying pan, a team of Hempfield Area High School students showed the school board the work that won them first place in a February engineering competition.
For nearly two decades, science teacher Tom Harden has sent students to Westinghouse’s Chain Reaction Contraption competition — which tasks students with creating Rube Goldberg-style machines that complete a specific task in as many steps as possible.
The machines must have at least 20 transitions and run for 30 seconds to two minutes. Students this year were required to design a machine that makes a sandwich.
Seven students from Hempfield’s 10-person Chain Reaction team demonstrated their machine — named “Ruben Smash” — to the school board last week. The team won first place at the competition, held at Westinghouse’s Cranberry headquarters.
The machine ran through its 28 steps in one minute, 10 seconds.
“We’ve had a really nice, successful run,” Harden said.
The students started working on the machine in mid-October, Harden said.
“This is done almost entirely in the evenings and off days,” he said, “so this shows a dedication and commitment by these kids to complete this task.”
Harden noted a group of students came into school for six hours the day before Thanksgiving to work on the project.
“Trying to get a kid to come to school when you don’t have to?” he said. “This is amazing. It’s fun. It’s a nice family atmosphere, and I really enjoy doing this.”
Student Alyssa Parker, the project manager of the group, received the competition’s inagural Chris Savinda Memorial Scholarship — given in honor of a Westinghouse mechanical engineer who died in 2024 after 22 years at the company.
The $1,000 scholarship will support Parker’s college expenses at Colorado School of Mines, an engineering university in Golden, Colo.
“From day one, she was a take-charge personality,” Harden said. “I don’t know if she remembers this, but I said ‘Alyssa, you have project manager written all over you.’ ”
