Headlines at Hopkins
News Release

Office of News and Information
Johns Hopkins University
901 South Bond Street, Suite 540
Baltimore, Maryland 21231
Phone: 443-287-9960 | Fax: 443-287-9920

July 24, 2008
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
CONTACT: Lindsay Carroll (Engineering Innovation administrator)
Cell 410-446-4108, lindsay.carroll@jhu.edu


Media Alert
Kids Test Engineering Skill Building, Breaking Bridges Made of Spaghetti

WHEN: Friday, July 25, 10 a.m.

WHERE: Mudd Hall Auditorium, The Johns Hopkins University Homewood campus, 3400 N. Charles St., Baltimore, Md.

WHAT: Students completing the summer Engineering Innovation program will compete to see who has built the strongest bridge made from spaghetti and glue. They'll hang weights from the pasta spans until they crack, splinter and disintegrate. The spaghetti bridges can weigh no more than 750 grams, but last summer's winners withstood loads of 70 kilograms, or about 154 pounds.

WHY: The students — more than 75 high school students and rising college freshmen from Maryland and around the country — have been at Johns Hopkins this summer for the annual Engineering Innovations summer program. The program (in which they take the university's regular semester-long "What is Engineering?" course in four weeks) exposes them to the discipline and profession of engineering and gives them hands-on experience in using technology to solve problems. The spaghetti bridge contest is the culmination of a program in which they've also built better mousetraps, worked with chemical processes, and assembled digital circuits to operate a robot. The students, working in teams of three, have been designing and building their bridges for the past two and a half weeks.

MEDIA CONTACT AT THE EVENT: Lindsay Carroll (Engineering Innovation program administrator). Cell phone: 410-446- 4108.

LOGISTICS: See JHU map at tinyurl.com/jhuparkingmap. Park in South Garage (Location 2 on map) and walk north to Mudd Hall (Location 46 on map).