The Engineering, Design, and Innovation Fellows 2020 cohort stayed at Kiptopeke Park (VA) to design and construct a concrete boat to hold two of them at a time.  On the second day, the Fellows designed and constructed a frame to serve as a mold for their concrete canoe.   Here is Nikolas Chrones ’20 to provide insight into how the BIG test went.

At first when we were looking at the 12 foam boards that we were given to build the frame for the concrete boat we couldn’t figure out the best way to make a frame that would both be structurally sound and also large enough to hold two people. Coach Barton reminded us of the ziggurats that we built in 8th grade and we knew pretty quickly what needed to be done. We started by cutting the boards so that when stacked on top of one another it would form an upside down boat shape, then we took an orbital sander to take the edge off of the boards that we had cut. In the end we had a sturdy frame that wasn’t too small to
build our boat. To finish off our frame we put garbage bags over it so that the concrete would form in a smooth way that wasn’t too uncomfortable to sit in.