From: Phil deHaan (dehp@calvin.edu)
Date: Wed Oct 02 2002 - 16:22:26 EDT
October 2, 2002 == FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
A contest sponsored by the American Society of Civil Engineers club at Calvin
College will see an odd flotilla of vessels take to a pond on campus for an
unusual race to be held Friday, October 4 at 4 p.m.
The boats will all be made of cardboard, garbage bags and tape. The idea will
be to complete a lap of the Sem Pond on Calvin's campus as quickly as possible
(or to complete a lap before sinking as the case might be). The rules for the
"Cardboard Canoe Contest" state that all team members must ride in the canoe and
finish the race in the canoe and that the canoe must finish the race afloat
(judges will decide exactly what is and is not "afloat").
The contest first came to Calvin's campus in the early 1990s and then sank for
a time before being raised again last year by members of the ASCE club (with the
encouragement of ASCE mentor and Calvin Engineering professor Robert Hoeksema).
Calvin students hope the contest will help raise awareness at Calvin about
Civil Engineering and get people interested in ASCE. Besides sponsoring the
Cardboard Canoe contest, club members attend meetings and go on field trips that
explore civil engineering fields and projects. They also attend monthly
luncheons of ASCE's West Michigan Branch, where they get to meet with
professional engineers.
This year at least five student teams plan to compete in the contest. Cash
prizes will go to first- and second-place finishers as well as to the most
creative design.
Calvin senior Paul Ryckbost of Holland, president this year of Calvin's ASCE
chapter, says the creativity component of the contest is not to be overlooked.
"For me, the most enjoyable part of the contest is seeing how creative students
from every discipline can be," he says. "And even if they get wet, they don't
care; it's fun to be creative and innovative."
Indeed last year Ryckbost spent about six minutes in the cold water of the pond
because he and his team had "overdesigned our canoe and it tipped too easily."
~ with reporting by media relations student writer Abe Huyser-Honig
-end-
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