ANTIGO - Thursday morning was hammer time for students at Antigo High School.

Six teams competed against each other to win the preliminary round of the annual Rube Goldberg competition.

"It’s useful when they get out of here because it teaches them valuable job skill, said Physics Teacher, Larry Stookey.

"When they go to college, there are colleges and universities that will grant them a scholarship simply for having participated."


Rube Goldberg was a Pulitzer Prize winning cartoonist, sculptor and author.

Senior Ben Kryka thinks that this competition is very similar to Goldberg’s legacy.

"Nobody really knew what it was and then our team last year took second place at state. we set the record for the school," said Kryka.

"Now everybody knows about it. You can see that there’s much more people here than it was last year."

The school streamed video of the competition live throughout the school.

"Any laptop with internet connection could watch it as well," said Senior, John Karolus.

"Then we also recorded it so that anybody that wanted to go back and watch it again and I thought that was pretty exciting."

Just like sports, there has to be a winner and a loser.

"We’re going to take first because some of the other machines had to avoid some runs," Kryka said.

"We had three perfect runs now that I just heard and so far there’s nothing really holding us back."

100% Ice came in first and Newton’s 4th came in second.

Third place went to Fapp,y, Your worst Nightware came in fourth, The Brotherhood cane in fifth and Sixth place went to Stop! Hammertime!

Story By: Shardaa Gray