Ian Esaki, a freshman from Kapa'a majoring in materials science and engineering, was a first-place winner in the 2007 Local Rube Goldberg Machine Contest yesterday at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Ind.

Esaki is on the winning Purdue Society of Professional Engineers team.

The annual competition rewards creativity and inefficiency in completing a simple task.

This year's task was to create a machine to take a whole orange, juice it and then pour the juice from a pitcher into a cup in a minimum of 20 steps.

The team will compete at the National Rube Goldberg Machine Contest on March 31 at Purdue (see the event coverage at http://news.uns.purdue.edu/x/2007a/070224RubeRegional.html).

The contest honors late cartoonist Rube Goldberg, who specialized in drawing whimsical, complicated machines that performed simple tasks.