How the concrete canoe team builds a boat that shouldn't float

It's basically just a canoe made out of concrete. "Paddles ready. Go!" As civil engineers, we get to work with a lot of materials and structural analysis and this kind of encompasses all of that into a design team where you can work with other students and faculty to figure out a problem that's not very common. The challenge is making it lightweight and durable enough. If your canoe is an inch thick, obviously it isn't going to float. But if your canoe is half an inch, you have problems with maybe cracking. So, sort of walk along that line of, is it strong enough and is it going to float or is it going to just break under us? Normal concrete mix, it's made up of like binders, which are the glue that holds the mix together. And then the aggregates, which are more like rocks and stones that you would see in normal concrete. Our aggregates are like a fraction of a millimeter large. And then they're also really light in hollow spheres. So it's sort of about experimenting with different ratios of those like binder materials and aggregates and finding what's gonna be light and then also give us the strength that we need. We go and compete every spring at the ASCE symposium. We've been really fortunate the past two years we got first at the regional competition so we were able to go to the national competition which was an amazing experience both years and then last year we were able to secure a second place overall position at the national competition so this year we do have high goals and we're striving for more but we've put so much work and hard work into our project this year that I'm already really proud of our team. I love building on like the past experiences having that knowledge and that success as a foundation I feel like really helps us be a lot better when it comes to adapting and innovating. We've been able to kind of foster a very versatile team just with like being able to have all of our new members learn every aspect of the project so that if they want to continue with the team they're able to provide and help out in any part of the project. So that's always been our goal is that big transfer of knowledge because we want this team to continue to be great and strive for the greatest. One of the things that drew me to it originally and still does is like the really great community. It's nice to just do hands-on work with a bunch of other engineers. We have a lot of fun while doing it but it's also just super rewarding to get to come up with like a finished product that we get to race and competition and display and show our friends and our family, all of our hard work.