When on the first day of middle school Principal Kim announces a Contraption Convention, young inventor Rube Goldberg must conquer his anxieties and a ghostly mystery to come up with something brilliant for the judges and his friends.

Just as Rube and his two best friends, Boob and Pearl, are busy agonizing over the Switcheroo Dance and planning Pearl's campaign for class president, they discover that Beechwood was once a sundown town and Rube realizes that racism and bigotry still exist there.