By Jeremiah Vaille
On Friday April 9th and Saturday April 10th, the Colorado School of Mines Student Chapter of the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) will host the 2022 Rocky Mountain Regional Conference. The ASCE regional conference is an exciting event full of competitions between eight schools in Colorado, Wyoming, and South Dakota. This is the first in person ASCE Rocky Mountain Regional Conference since 2019: in 2020 the event was canceled and in 2021 it was held online. The extra time build-up brings a lot of excitement to the event. The eve
The events include the concrete canoe competition, technical paper and presentation, non-technical paper and presentation, mystery design competition, pre-design competition, surveying competition, sustainable solutions competition, steel bridge competition and a charity event. Students from Colorado School of Mines will be participating in every event.
On Friday, events will take place in Steinhauer Fieldhouse and the Student Center from 8:30am to 5:30pm. The steel bridge competition will take place in the fieldhouse on Friday and the concrete canoes will also be on display in the field house for spectators to see. The steel bridge competition is an exciting event with teams assembling a bridge they have designed and machined as quickly as possible then judging the strength, deformation, and aesthetic. The bridge teams are judged based on their time to complete their construction following set rules including not stepping in or touching the “scale highway’’ they build over, not dropping tools, members, or anything else, as well as deformation with loading. The Conference Faculty Advisor, Prof. Jeff Holley explained that “in the rare case of a tie it comes down to aesthetics.” Mines will compete with seven other teams in the steel bridge competition.
The presentations and design competitions will take place in the Student Center on Friday. The pre-design teams will compete in moving three gallons of water from one bucket to another using only wind power provided by a fan. The pre-design will be judged on quickest time to move all the water or most water moved in ten minutes. The mystery design team will find out their challenge on Friday, then compete in creating the best design.
On Saturday, the conference will travel to Soda Lakes at Bear Creek Lake Park for the concrete canoe races. Holley says that the concrete canoe competition “is an exciting time.” The canoes, which have been designed and constructed by the students, will undergo a swamp test where they are sunk and must return to the surface of the water themselves. The teams will race their canoes in 5 races making the competition one of best design and fitness. The surveying competition will start in the morning at Soda Lakes, and the canoe racing along with a sandcastle competition will begin in the afternoon when it is warmer.
For the full schedule of events, go to the Mines ASCE website and find the Rocky Mountain Regional Conference tab. Mailer II has the full schedule and additional information about all the events. If you are a student interested in volunteering to help the event run smoothly, contact Jeff Holley at jholley@mines.edu ASAP
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