CEE undergraduates exercised their engineering skills in that most competitive of arenas: construction of gingerbread houses.
In an end-of-the-year social sponsored by ASCE, students, faculty, and staff gathered for hot chocolate and cookies while they watched teams of students battle it out with gingerbread, toothpicks, marshmallow cream, and gumdrops.
Each team wanted to have the coolest structure, but more importantly (this is engineering), it had to be structurally sound. Soundness would be determined by subjecting all creations to a go on the shake table.
In the end, the winning team's house was one of the tallest but it did not break at all on the shake table.
A darkhorse emerged when another group finished near the top, even though it had no civil engineering majors on the team.
