Six Elkmont High School Sr. Beta Club students are preparing to show off their skills on a national stage, but they’ve got to raise the funds to get there first.

The five students who make up the school’s engineering group have competed and advanced to the National Beta Competition three years in a row. The team first got together in their freshman year of high school.

“We knew we wanted to do something engineering-based,” team member Emily Norman said. “We sort of winged it the first year, and it was a little crazy.”

Each team in the competition must build a Rube Goldberg machine, or an invention that solves “a simple task in the most overcomplicated, inefficient, and hilarious way possible,” according to www.rubegoldberg.com.

As for the machine’s namesake, Rube Goldberg is described on the website as “a cartoonist, an inventor, and the only person ever to be listed in Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary as an adjective.” The machines came from a series of cartoons featuring a character named Professor Butts.

Norman said she and her teammates — Claudia Allen, Guadalupe Saldago, Shelby Norman and Kayla Menefee — managed to create a five-step machine that could pop a balloon using dominos, a ball, a wooden structure and more. It was worthy of second place in the state competition and the Elkmont Sr. Beta Club’s first trip to the national engineering competition.

When they got to Orlando, Florida, where the competition was held, the students had to tweak their machine to put a stamp on an envelope and prove they could think outside the box.

“We did it perfectly,” she said. “We started screaming and jumping.”

The group won third place, and they placed second again at the 2018 and 2019 state competitions. While this qualified them for nationals both years, they didn’t place last year.

If they can hit their fundraising goal, they’ll be able to travel to Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, to try again. To do so, they’re selling shaved ice at school and throughout Limestone County.

“Last year, we did it at tractor pulls and made a lot of money,” Shelby Norman said.

This year, she said, they’ve decided to sell at alternate locations more often. The girls set up shop with two of their moms outside Elkmont Elementary School, where students could purchase a shaved ice in any of six flavors for $3.

The team is also selling shaved ice and baked goods at weekend events. On Saturday, they can be found at Tractor Supply Co. on U.S. 72 West in Athens from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. On Saturday, May 25, they’ll expand their fundraiser even further with a car wash alongside their sale at Advance Auto Parts near Hine Street and U.S. 72 in Athens.

Their goal is to raise $5,000 in time for the competition June 19–22.

GoFundHistory

Hoping to join the engineering team in Oklahoma is Mikey Gilliland, a ninth-grader and history aficionado. Gilliland said he first participated in the competitions as a sixth-grader in Jr. Beta.

“I’ve always loved history,” he said.

He said his mother is responsible for making sure he participated in the state competition his first year. Gilliland placed first in Social Studies Division II and earned a second place spot the next year. He managed a sixth place spot at nationals in 2017, then took a year off.

Now he’s back, armed with another second-place win at the 2019 state Sr. Beta competition and ready to take on the national competition. To get there, he must raise at least $1,000, but he has set a goal of $3,000 to make sure as many out-of-pocket costs as possible are covered.

To do this, he helps out with the shaved ice sales but ultimately relies on donations to two online fundraisers set up for his trip. The first can be found at www.gofundme.com/mikeys-trip-to-national-beta, while the second can be found on Facebook at bit.ly/mikeys-trip-to-national-beta.