Hyde Creek Boat Racing

 

Thursday, January 23rd, 2025

On a cold Thursday in January, the STEAM 9 and STEAM 10 classes went out to Hyde Creek for the highly anticipated STEAM Cardboard Boat Racing. We arrived at 8:45 AM and were given a quick speech about the challenge overview and some safety rules before we started building. The materials we were given were simple: two 4 x 8-foot 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 thought process was to make the boat long enough so someone could lie down and just “cruise” through. That way, it would be easy to add more people if it held up—kind of like lying down in a coffin-boat (?). Although that didn’t work out because our boat was so long that it started bending and sinking in the middle, which was the main reason for our downfall. During the race, we somehow managed to barely survive with one person onboard, but as soon as we added the second person after five minutes, we sank.

If I could improve my design, I would make it smaller and make the walls higher. Another thing I would do is HEAVILY waterproof the boat. We got a little bit lazy and decided not to waterproof it as much, which caused water to get in very easily and made sinking much easier. The mass of our paddler affected us because he was a light, tall person, and we needed a tall person. If someone short like me had gone, all the mass would have been in the middle, causing it to fold. But since we had a tall person, the weight was more distributed, which helped with buoyancy. Here are some pictures of my team building our boat and it being used in the race.