USU Earns 7 Competition Wins at Regional ASCE Conference

Timber Strong: 1st Place

A more recent addition to ASCE student competitions, the Timber-Strong challenge has students design and construct a two-story wooden building that is sustainable, aesthetically pleasing and durable. This is USU’s second time participating and second time taking home the top prize.

This year’s theme was “Big Blue’s Barn,” featuring a spot for our beloved mascot to hang out in between football games.

Surveying: 1st place

The surveying competition requires students to use standard field equipment and procedures to solve common problems encountered in the industry. The team had five tasks: 1. Create a topographic map with the provided data and present the map, 2. Record distance based on steps, 3. Use a level and a measuring rod to measure different elevations down to one specific point, 4. Use a total station to stake the corners of a building based on distance and angles, and 5. With the given data, calculate where cuts and fills will be needed for a sewer line. This is the third year in a row that USU students have secured 1st place.

Steel Bridge: 1st Place

The Student Steel Bridge Competition challenges students to extend their classroom knowledge to a practical and hands-on steel-design project that grows their interpersonal and professional skills, encourages innovation, and fosters impactful relationships between students and industry professionals. Each student team must develop a concept for a scale-model steel bridge to span approximately 20 feet and hold 2,500 lbs. There are time constraints set in place, and bridges are load-tested, weighed and judged on aesthetics. Returning steel bridge participant Isaac Hilton captained the team.

Construction Institute: 1st Place

Teams are presented with a modern-day construction challenge and are given a few hours to prepare and present a solution. This was a new addition to the competitions this year.

Non-Technical Paper: 1st Place

Students submitted 2,000-word papers on how an engineer balances regulations and ethics. The paper had to be nominated by the faculty advisor of each chapter. This year the paper was presented by Katie Andersen on the ethical considerations of AI in civil engineering.

Concrete Canoe: 2nd Place

The concrete canoe competition provides students an opportunity to gain hands-on experience by building a canoe out of concrete to test their concrete mix designs and project management skills. The USU theme was “The Pollinator,” inspired by Utah’s bee-themed symbolism adopted by the early European settlers of Utah.

Captain Brett Safely oversaw the design, quality and presentation of the concrete canoe project. This was his fourth time participating in the conference.

“Bees symbolize a community that works for the good of the whole, each bee does its part to provide for the entire swarm,” he said. “For the future civil engineers studying at USU, the beehive symbolizes us as we work together with the public to support and help one another and to create thriving communities.”

Ursa Major, the 2023 canoe design, made another appearance when the University of Utah and Arizona State University team borrowed USU’s canoe to compete after difficulties with their own.

Transportation: 3rd Place

The Utah Department of Transportation asked teams to analyze traffic issues along Main Street in Logan and present their findings. Intersection design, traffic congestion, highway geometry and transit-modeling were a few examples of the types of problems students encountered.