ISU freshmen start Rubik's Cube Club

His hands moved in a dizzying motion.

The colors on the plastic block switched with each move.

Right-inverted, down-inverted, right and down.

The seconds hand passed by the top of the clock.

Up, right, up-inverted, left-inverted; up, right-inverted, up-inverted and left.

The color patterns changed quickly from a mess of colorful stickers to a solid white side and half-and-half blues and reds.

Holding the nearly-completed cube still, he carefully but quickly thought about the next course of action.

And it continued; left-inverted, up, left, up, front, up-inverted and front-inverted.

"It's really not that hard," said Rohan Sharma, freshman in aerospace engineering, while fumbling around with a 2-by-2 cube right before going step-by-step, slowly explaining the different situations and patterns a first-time "Cuber" would need to know.

Sharma's 2-by-2 Rubik's Cube was solved, yellow the opposite of white, red opposite of orange, blue across from green, and the seconds hand was still trying to keep up, not even getting halfway around the circle.

Putting the pieces together

Sharma, president of ISU Rubik's Cube Club and freshman in aerospace engineering, found his father's 1982 Rubik's cube when he was in the 11th grade.

After pulling it out of a box in their home garage, Sharma took about five days to solve the cube.

Only a couple years later, Sharma is focused on speed-cubing, which involves solving a Rubik's Cube while competing against the time clock; he is already third in state ranking for 3-by-3.

Instead of solving the cubes using the standard patterns or "cheat sheets" he first learned with, he is now looking for new puzzles and something unique to work on.

Sharma and the club don't limit themselves to just using standard cubes though. Sharma pulled out a puzzle, "Rubik's Magic," where the goal is to get three rings detached and back together again. Sharma says his record time is 1.15 seconds and then retracts his statement.

"Wait, wait; I actually think it's, 2.15 seconds. Yeah," he said.

He has also explored cubing with your feet, underwater, one-handed, blindfolded and upside-down, which Sharma says is intense once all the blood has rushed to your head mid-solve.

Today, Sharma can solve and is working on improving his time on a 7-by-7 puzzle and is looking for an 11-by-11 cube; not the Rubik's Cubes from Walmart, the nice ones that smoothly switch — from a company in Oregon — or the discounts they get from a dealer in China.

"You're always looking for something that is unique," he said. "Something that sets you apart almost."

Sharma got the idea and laid down the plan for the club in the fall semester of 2010; he elected temporary officers and met with people as a collective group.

Since the beginning of the semester, he said the club has been growing like a spider web; where one person tells another and then they tell two people.

He saw that there wasn't a Rubik's Cube club at Iowa State, and he was surprised later on to find out that with 28 members, his club had more members than MIT's club, which has 15 members and has existed for five years.

Sharma describes the club as an underground community similar to that of a poker club.

The nerd stereotypes following the club members around aren't something Sharma has ever experienced.

Most people want to learn how to cube and think it's cool, he said.

With the help of Sharma and other seasoned cubers, new members are beginning to solve their 3-by-3 cubes in less than two minutes and making great friends in the process.

Last week, the club went in front of the Government of the Student Body to ask for more money to increase inventory to provide each member with a 3-by-3 cube and to buy more complicated puzzles, but was turned down.

The previous time the club spoke to GSB, one of the members said in his speech to the senators, "Solving a cube is something you can show on a date."

From then on, the joke circulating the club members was that it was a goal for each single member to get a date with each cube success.

Sharma laughs and says he doesn't know of anyone who has actually done that but knows that members of the group, such as Malcolm Kelly — freshman in mechanical engineering — have posted statuses on Facebook that read, "Hey ladies, guess who just solved a Rubik's cube for the first time?!"

Although they didn't get the money they asked for, they sparked the interest of a few GSB members.

"We were rather shocked," Sharma said, in response to the GSB members who called them "cute" freshmen; and after denying them, came up to ask about how they could be a part of the club.

"In the long run, we want to host a competition that's nationally recognized and put the university's name out there," he said.

Not only does the club want to host competitions, but they'd like to be able to go on trips to experience what the Rubik's Cube world is like outside Iowa State.

The club will travel to Clinton — not to Flav's Fried Chicken — but to a mock competition April 16, using their personal money.

Sharma said that it's important to show what a real competition looks like and how it feels to compete in one; adding he was "scared as hell" at his first competition.

"It's literally a party," he said.