Mountain Pointe’s Noah Swatton stays afloat in a competition by engineering students who used cardboard and duct tape to make boats and raced them in Tempe.
A group of Tempe Union High School District engineering and physics students raced in boats made entirely of cardboard and duct tape Thursday.
Students from Desert Vista, Marcos de Niza and Mountain Pointe high schools competed in the Great Cardboard Race at the Kiwanis Recreation Center in Tempe to gain hands-on experience in the process of designing an engineering product.
Kate Roman, a teacher at Marcos de Niza High School, said it was an opportunity for the students from the three schools to conceptualize, design and create the boats. Over the past quarter, students from the schools have put hours of work into their boats.
“They’re presented with a situation, and they have to research it and build prototypes,” she said. “They have to do calculations to see the size of the boat they need, the depth of the walls and then they have to actually build it.”
Thirteen teams of three or four students took part in the friendly competition, which saw the students get inside their cardboard boats and use paddles made from the same material, or their hands, to paddle across the pool.
Laughs were abundant, as some boats sank or tipped as the full weight of a high school student was laid on them in the water, while other groups sped across the pool, dedicated to winning their heats.
Roman said that the competitive na-
ture of the races were a lesson about the job market for the students, who will be off to college or the work force soon after graduation.
“If you’re pitching your idea to a company, you’re actually competing against other people,” she said, adding, “and we wanted to make that clear to them in a fun way.”
Besides the race itself, students were to write a report on the strengths and weaknesses of their boats, as well as key takeaways from the whole project.
Robbie Shaw, a junior at Mountain Pointe High School and the rower for a white, shark-shaped boat named “Jaws,” said the project took a lot more work than the group expected.
“We did a lot of math, calculating buoyancy and how much weight our boat can actually hold before it will sink. We also learned a lot about structural integrity,” he said.
Elated that their boat made the trip through the pool relatively undamaged, Shaw’s teammates exchanged high fives and hugs, happy their work over the past month had paid off.
“I thought we were going to sink 15 feet in honestly, so that was a big surprise,” he said with a smile.