Some people remember the Rube Goldberg machine from the opening scene in the 1985 movie “Back to the Future.”

That’s exactly what All Saints Academy High School sophomore Brock Weirather and his classmates did Saturday at Florida Polytechnic University, even though most of them were not even born when the movie opened.

“We got a random assortment of materials,” Weirather said. “We just ran and grabbed everything we could and we kind of came up with it on the spot and a lot of teamwork. A lot of bonding and we had this idea.”

The competition was one of the university’s programs that allows them to give back to the community. Local kids in both middle school and high school competed.

“It’s a great learning tool for problem solving. So it’s a combination of physics principles and also general problem solving skills that they have to do in order to complete this,” said Assistant Professor Susan LeFrancois.

Sounds pretty smart right? And it takes some smart kids with a big imagination to pull it off.

“I thought it was interesting. Just the whole idea. I really wanted to make ours different by coming up with a vertical component so we decided to utilize the ceiling,” said All Saints Academy High School senior Melanie Rex.

The hardest part for the groups of students was making sure every marble hit each domino and the strings from the ceilings move with the bicycle pedal on their machines.

The complicated competition will give one of the lucky groups the chance to hang out at the university and eat lunch on their campus.

It might even convince them to one day become a student there.