Westmoreland schools take top spots in Westinghouse Chain Reaction Contraption contest

Feb. 2—From marbles to movie tributes, Westmoreland County students made all the right moves when it came to creating a Rube Goldberg-style machine for the annual Westinghouse Chain Reaction Contraption contest.

Teams from Hempfield Area and Franklin Regional high schools took the No. 1 and No. 2 spots, respectively, in the annual competition held last month at Westinghouse's Cranberry headquarters.

At Hempfield, science teacher Tom Harden has been sending students to the competition for 17 years.

"I started it as a club originally, and was just looking for a creative way to work with students who love science," Harden said. "After three or four years, it became part of the gifted enrichment program."

Hempfield's team of 10 students took this year's theme of "Play a Game" and used it to create a machine modeled on the fictional board game and film "Jumanji."

Teams' end products had to use at least 20 steps, and judges docked points for each "intervention" — each time a student had to prod part of the machine to keep it going.

Students from both teams said fitting everything together was the biggest challenge.

"Ordering all of the steps and making them work all together was hard," said Bella Bargerstock, 16, a Hempfield junior. "We had an idea about how it would all connect and didn't always work out that way."

Harden said one Hempfield team member tried to re-create the "stampede" scene from "Jumanji" using marbles, but ended up creating an element that was too big to fit in the machine, which was designed to mimic the mansion from the film.

Franklin Regional junior John Ciecierski, 17, agreed.

"Getting everything to work individually was easy, but getting it all working at once is a big challenge," he said.

Simply setting the machine up can be a tricky task.

Franklin Regional students accidentally triggered different parts of their contraption — designed to look like a slot machine including a big pull lever on the side — multiple times before getting it fully reset for a demonstration.

In previous years, Westinghouse and the Carnegie Science Center partnered to host the competition. This year, science center officials opted to host their own version, where students are all presented with the same materials the day of the competition and have a time limit to create their machine from scratch.

Not so with the original Westinghouse version. Harden said his team had been working on its machine since mid-September.

"We've made it to the finals every year since 2010 except for one," he said. "We've done very well, and I try to hold the kids to a very high standard. I tell them that I want to see the machine work the way it's supposed to, 10 times in a row, before we're ready to take it to the competition."

Hempfield has taken first place in the past three contests.

Franklin Regional senior Lizzie Dudley, 18, said the competition hones a lot of skills in participants.

"You have to use skills like critical thinking, teamwork and problem solving," she said.

Franklin Regional science teacher Richard Sunny, who served as the FR team's advisor, also has his students build similar machines in a physics module later in the school year.

And while both teams' machines worked as intended at the competition, it was a little more difficult to demonstrate them afterward, after a lot of jostling on the ride home.

"That's what we get for laying it on its side when we were coming back from the competition," Ciecierski said with a laugh.

Patrick Varine is a Tribune-Review staff writer. You can contact Patrick by email at pvarine@triblive.com or via Twitter .