The Rube Goldberg Machine Contest is a contest in which students of all ages build Rube Goldberg machines to complete an everyday task in the style of American cartoonist Rube Goldberg. The contest is held internationally and, after the Covid-19 pandemic, digitally. Live regional contests and local and regional winners are eligible and invited to compete in the national contest.

A Rube Goldberg machine, named after American cartoonist Rube Goldberg, is a chain reaction–type machine or contraption intentionally designed to perform a simple task in an indirect and (impractically) overly complicated way. Usually, these machines consist of a series of simple unrelated devices; the action of each triggers the initiation of the next, eventually resulting in achieving a stated goal.