ASCE Concrete Canoe Competition
This project will support Carnegie Mellon University’s student chapter of the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) participation in the Concrete Canoe competition during the Mid-Atlantic West ASCE Student Symposium, April 11 to 13, 2024. Your gift will help cover student registration, lodging and travel costs for the competition, as well as additional materials and supplies required to build the canoe.
The concrete canoe competition challenges students to design, build, test and compete to race a canoe made entirely from concrete. Students are able to gain hands-on experience with engineering skills and test their designs against fellow student chapters. CMU ASCE has previously participated in this competition, but we have not participated in recent years. With a team committed to competing this year, we are hopeful that we will participate for the first time in almost a decade. This year, the competition is hosted at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia. Throughout the school year, students of the CMU ASCE chapter will be involved in various tasks to prepare for this competition, such as structural analysis and design for the canoe’s hull, concrete mix development to determine the optimal material for the canoe, and creating a presentation to showcase our canoe. This project will help our members develop both their technical and leadership skills, and better prepare them for their future engineering careers. Competing in the competition for the first time in almost a decade, we hope to learn from previous experiences and build a strong foundation to compete annually.