Extreme Gingerbread Competition a Success

The Brown University Society for Women Engineers in collaboration with the University's Engineers Without Borders student organization held its fourth annual "Extreme Gingerbread House Competition" on Friday, December 3. Twenty-one teams of three to five students and professors participated, and the event raised more than $125 for Engineers without Borders. This year, Engineers Without Borders is focusing on helping a Haitian orphanage that was damaged during the earthquake in January, 2010. The designs ranged from the traditional to the modern, and included circular houses, and a replica of Frank Lloyld Wright’s Fallingwater.


This year, the teams were challenged to build earthquake resistant gingerbread houses out of graham crackers, icing, candy canes, pretzels, gummy bears and other supplied materials in a one-hour time period. Houses were required to be hollow with a maximum wall thickness of one inch, and had to exceed 6” x 6” x6”. The houses were judged both for aesthetics, and amount of time without breaking on a shake table.

Team eight, the bleeding gumdrops (Kelly Schryver ’11, Ben Howard ’11, Katie Delaney ’11, Adam Maynard ’11) won the competition with a score of 66.67 (16.67 appearance score and 50 structure score), while team 21 (Nick Ragosta ‘12, Ben Freudberg ‘12, Nattie Cooper ‘12, Aris Nakos ‘12) was close behind with a total score of 66.33 (16.33 for appearance plus 50 for structure). Team 16, known as team Barus & Holly (Kristie Chin ’11, Camile Rodriguez ’11, Katrina Wilson ’11, Kelsi Hirai ’11--with advising help from Professor Daniels), finished in third with a score of 65.67 (15.67 for appearance and 50 for structure). In all, seven of the 21 teams survived the maximum time of one minute.