Hyde Creek Boat Racing
Thursday, January 23rd 2025
On a cold Thursday of January, the Steam 9 and Steam 10’s went out to Hyde Creek for the highly aniticipated STEAM Cardboard Boat Racing. We arrived at 8:45 AM and were given a quick little speech about the challenge’s overview and some safety rules before we started building. The materials we were given were simple, two 4 x 8 inch cardboard sheets, box knives, a roll of duct tape and a roll of packaging tape. A week before my group discussed how we would make our boat, our main thinking process was making the boat long enough so you can lie down and just “cruise” through so it would be easy to add more people if it help up. Like lying down in a coffin-boat(?). Although, that clearly didn’t work out because our boat was so long it was bending and sinking from the middle which is the main huge factor to our downfall. During the race, we somehow manged to barely survive with one person on, but soon as we added the second person after 5 minutes we sank.
If I could improve my design I would definetly make it smaller and make the walls higher. Another thing that I would do is to HEAVILY water proof the boat, we got a little bit lazy and decided not to do it waterproof it as much. Which caused water to get in our boat very easily and making sinking much easier. The mass of our paddler affected as because he is a light weight tall person and we needed a tall person. If someone short like me went through all the mass would be in the middle causing it to fold. But since we had a tall personn go, the weight was more distributed which would contribute to the buoyancy.