BY NATALIE BROWN
Staff Writer

A group of Baldwin students competed in an event Friday at the Carnegie Science Center, and with a tip of the hat to Macklemore, they came away happy.

The goal was to create a “Rube Goldberg” contraption that communicated a message. The message had to be longer than 30 seconds, but no more than two minutes.

The eight members of the team completed a run with a message time of 1:59 seconds, winning the award for “Longest Successfully Executed Contraption.”

Because Baldwin’s team had contructed almost all of its contraption out of recycled, leftover, or borrowed materials, the team’s theme was “Thrift Shop,” gifted coordinator Debbie Reynolds said. They had the Macklemore song playing alongside their contraption, and the message communicated was “Create Your Own Thift Shop: Reuse, Recyle, Repurpose.”

“It’s really nice to see the kids panicking, in a good way, and caring about the competition,” gifted coordinator Brad Schulte said.

At the competition, 36 teams with a total of 350 kids competed. This is the first year Baldwin has competed. Baldwin won one of the eight awards available to the competitors.