(Music)
Student 1: I learned a lot.
Student 2: Oh yeah.
Student 1: I learned so much.
Student 2: I learned a whole lot.
Sam: Lightweight concrete was a big challenge.
Kassandra: It looks really, you know, small and insignificant, but I think it’s more
about how clean it’s going to be.
William: I’m a part of the surveying group going to the Deep South Conference, and we
have a few different competitions that we’re competing in.
One is the concrete canoe, steel bridge, and then surveying.
There is a couple of others.
Basically it’s an engineering type of competition that’s put together.
Kassandra: ASCE is America Society of Civil Engineers.
We have a chapter here at UALR.
Blake: Well, this is a concrete canoe.
It’s made from three different lightweight concrete mixtures.
Sam: Most people immediately scoff at the idea, and laugh, and after you’ve kept a
straight face for a minute they come back and say, “Well, but how does that work?”
Blake: We’re headed to Memphis to compete.
We have pass a swamp test first.
So we have to fill the canoe up with water, then completely push it under water.
And then it has to come back, and at least some portion of the canoe has to break the
surface of the water within two minutes.
Sam: Theoretically, we should pass the swamp test without much of a problem.
Kassandra: I’m part of the environmental competition.
I’ve actually made this filter.
What we are doing is, um, filtering 20 liters of water.
We’re supposed to filter it through here and we’re going…they’re going to take
five samples of the resultant.
They’re going to grade us based on how much of the water we get to filter in a 15 minute
time limit, and how clean the water is.
Blake: Our lightest mixture weighs about 55 pounds per cubic foot, and our heaviest mixture weighs
right around 65 pounds per cubic foot.
Sam: We’ve got a good feeling that this boat is not going to fail.
Casey: We’re supposed to build a 20 foot bridge that spans over a seven foot river.
Uh, we had to design it from scratch.
It took us one semester to design it.
It took us all fall to design it.
And it’s taken us this far into the spring to actually build it.
It’s all steel.
Everything has to be magnetic.
That’s the big thing to it.
(Music)
Casey: I wanted to build a super light bridge.
This one’s only about 200 pounds.
So, that’s what I was shooting for.
2500 pounds that gets placed on it, and the whole time they’re measuring how far that
that bridge will flex.
Heather: The question for this year was, “Is it ethical for university engineering faculty
to teach technical subject matter to engineering students without obtaining professional licensure.
I took the stance that it is okay to teach without a P.E. license.
Casey: At the beginning of the competition all the pieces will be laid out on the floor,
and we have to build the bridge up and then…then it’s load tested.
So, we’re going to break it down to make it easier to transport.
(Music)
Sam: We learned a whole lot.
Umm, we’ve got some (laughs) Really what we talk about now is what we’re going to
do next year.
Casey: I learned a lot.
I learned a lot about steel design.
I also learned a lot about working metal.
Sam: We’re really excited about coming back next year, and, um, really being able to compete.
(Music)