Theta Tau hosts the Tower of Power competition during E-week

Theta Tau, Hopkins's Professional Engineering Fraternity, kicked off National Engineers Week (E-Week) at Hopkins with the Tower of Power competition this Monday in the Glass Pavilion. 19 different teams made up of undergraduates, graduate students, alumni and one team of middle school students competed to see who could build the tallest tower out of uncooked linguini and marshmallows at the annual event.

This is Theta Tau's first year of hosting the competition, which is in its fifth year. Theta Tau took over the event because the Hopkins Undergraduate Engineering Society is inactive this semester.

"It's really good for us because we've been wanting to do something with the Engineering School for a while, so now we finally got the chance to," sophomore Theta Tau President Tim Ouellette said.

Other E-Week events included the Society of Engineering Alumni Speed Networking event on Tuesday, the Graduate Representative Organization Pathway to Success Panel yesterday, the Interviewing Success Strategies for Engineers tonight at 5:30 p.m. in the Career Center Library and the Women in Engineering Panel in Levering at 4 p.m. on Friday.

This year also marks the 100th birthday of the Whiting School of Engineering. Dean Nicolas P. Jones, who spoke at the beginning of the Tower of Power event, explained that since the first year of the School of Engineering extended from fall 1912 to spring 1913, the School decided to begin celebrating at the start of 2012, which will result in a 20-month celebration.

"E-Week is really a great time for our community to have fun and recognize the importance of engineering at Johns Hopkins to our community, and, actually, to the world," Jones said. "I think this a particularly exciting time to be a student here, for many reasons, including the fact that we are celebrating our centennial, and I hope that you all will participate in the many events that we have over the course of the next 20 months or so."

The competition started directly after Jones spoke. Participants had exactly 30 minutes to build their tower. They used various strategies and worked at different speeds, but everyone's goal was to create the tallest tower that could stand up on its own. After 30 minutes, Theta Tau judges measured each tower with measuring tape to determine which one was the tallest. The first place team received $20 gift cards to Chipotle, and the second place team received $10 gift cards to Chipotle.

"I think the event went really well," Ouellette said. "I had fun [and] I think all of the other people had fun."

Ouellette estimates that about 80 people participated in the competition and that there were around 40 spectators.

"I haven't been to a competition before so it's interesting, " sophomore Maria Karapetkova, a spectator at the event, said.  "I like how it portrays the engineering spirit of the school."

There were also three middle school students at the event. Their team, made up of the Waldorf School of Baltimore's 7th graders Elias D'Anna, Matthew Hannan and Christopher Wolfrum was able to participate in the Tower of Power competition after winning the Center For Educational Resources' virtual competition for local middle school students with a 150 cm tower, which is about 59 inches. Over 450 students from 11 schools in the area participated in the competition, which was also to see who could build the tallest tower.

Last year's middle school team was also from Waldorf Middle School and won second place in the Hopkins competition. This year, unfortunately, the middle school team did not place, though they enjoyed getting to compete against Hopkins students.

"It was really exciting," Hannan said. "We started with squares, and then we were trying to build the tallest tower we could."

The first place winner, with a 69-inch tower, was comprised of first year graduate students Suman Dasgupta, Pegah Ghahremanr, Simon Lockyer-Bratton and Barbara Murienne. They based their tower off of online models.

"We just looked online and saw what someone had done, they had successfully won a spaghetti tower building competition. So we just looked at their design and modified it a bit," Lockyer-Bratton said.

The alumni team, who had won the last three competitions in a row, came in second place with a 67-inch tower. This year, only two alumni, Kathleen Bren, who was in the class of 1991, and Joe McClintock, from the class of 1979, participated. They gave their prize to the third place team. Their tower partially collapsed before judges had time to look at it because their tower was one of the last to be judged. Last year, the towers had to stand for five minutes before they were measured. However, this year, the judges, who were members of Theta Tau, started measuring towers from the front of the room. The alumni's tower was measured later than the first place team. Judges measured their tower based on how tall it would have been if it hadn't fallen down.

"[Next year] we'll set a time period [before the towers are measured] to make it fair," Ouellette said.

The third place team was a Hopkins undergraduate team comprised of sophomores Howard Fan, Mohd Rahman, Yususcan Sevimli and Album Shen. Their strategy was to start off with a hexagon and use double linguini beams. Their tower was 63 inches tall. The second level of their tower was a triangle.

"We were going to go through every polygon we could think of, but we decided to stick with triangles because those were the easiest," Shen said.

Although they thought that the competition was hectic, they already have plans to do it again next year.

"We should make a blueprint and do actual calculations for stresses," Rahman said.