It seemed like a very complicated way to turn a page.
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But, as Euan Lindsay explained to a crowd in the Engineering Building at CSU on Thursday afternoon, that was the whole point.
Mr Lindsay, the Foundation Professor of Engineering, was introducing this year's Rube Goldberg machine created by first-year student engineers as a team-building and problem-solving exercise.
The "machine" features a number of elements or steps that interact and combine to complete a single task.
For this year, that task was to open a 2018 Massachusetts Institute of Technology-sponsored report that named CSU Engineering as one of the top four emerging engineering schools in the world.
The students were this year asked to incorporate a pig (for the Chinese Year of the Pig) and recycled items from previous years' machines, but were otherwise generally free to let their imaginations run wild.
From pushing a single domino, the machine then included a ball, wheels, retractable tape measure and even a flying pot as each section seamlessly ran into the next.
One of those students, Kane Mitchell, from Orange, was part of the group that came up with the final steps for the machine.
"We [the first-year students] have been working on it flat out for two weeks," he said.
He said collaboration was the key as each step had to fit in with the next to achieve the required outcome.
"One group might have an idea, but it's how to get it to flow."
Mr Mitchell, who hopes to get into structural engineering when he finishes his degree, said he had enjoyed the exercise and had learnt a lot about his fellow students.
However, he acknowledged that the groups looking after the crucial start and finish phases of the contraption faced a fair bit of pressure.
Professor Bill Oakes, co-director of the EPICS (Engineering Projects in Community Service) Program and a member of the School of Engineering Education at Purdue University in the state of Indiana, USA, was the special guest who got to push the first domino to set the machine in motion.
"Many of us in the United States admire what is going on here at CSU," he said.
Last year's challenge involved finding the most complicated way possible to cut a piece of cake.