'An awesome celebration of carbs, creativity, and competition'

Rome may not have been built in a day, but competitors in this year's Tower of Power challenge proved that they could construct something impressive in far less time— half an hour, in fact—using one of Italy's most famous (and delicious) exports: spaghetti.

Held annually, the competition serves as a signature event for the Engineers Week celebration at Johns Hopkins University's Whiting School of Engineering, challenging teams of local middle school students—as well as Hopkins undergraduate and graduate students, staff, and alumni—to engineer the tallest structure using only marshmallows and dry spaghetti. In his welcome remarks, Whiting School Dean Ed Schlesinger called the event "an awesome celebration of carbs, creativity, and competition"—but in the end, everyone knows it's the height that matters most.

In this year's competition, held Tuesday afternoon in the Glass Pavilion on the Homewood campus, the team from the Waldorf School of Baltimore tasted victory with its gravity-defying 163 cm miniature monolith, topping four other middle school teams and two Johns Hopkins undergraduate teams. The Summit School came in second, and Our Lady of Mount Carmel School captured the Most Creative award.

"We definitely had a plan," said Waldorf team member Elia, who along with teammates Lea and Marcin stuck to the method of constructing a very wide base first and building upwards as the clock's final minutes ticked down. "We competed against the rest of our middle school and won, and we used a similar approach there."

The 30-minute contest looked at various times to be anyone's for the taking, as teams from Notre Dame Preparatory and The Summit School began neck in neck, achieving early surges in height over their competitors. With about 20 minutes left, the team representing Our Lady of Mount Carmel School looked like it might win, but competitors from McDonogh Middle School mounted a potential come-from-behind attack with only seven minutes left. Waldorf's wide-base method proved that foundational stability was key, however, as another team struggled with a collapse in the closing minutes and one team's structure succumbed right after the final buzzer.

"The students are really impressive, and their towers are really advanced," said Shiori Harima, co-president of the Johns Hopkins University Society of Women Engineers, which, as always, sponsored and judged the competition. "They all had good plans going into the event."