College-level engineering contests are more than an opportunity for students to socialize. Participants in the recent National Concrete Canoe Competition and the National Student Steel Bridge Competition relish the chance to show off their engineering practice chops on real-life challenges, with changing rules and parameters that confound students each year. "In the real world, there's standards for everything you build, so this forces us to be creative and think," says Jaime Kurten, a captain of the University of Wisconsin-Madison team, which on June 27, became the first college team to win the canoe-building contest three years in a row. The competition, sponsored by the American Society of Civil Engineers, had the 21 teams design, construct and race their concrete creations.
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