The Brown University Society for Women Engineers held its fifth annual "Extreme Gingerbread House Competition" on Friday, December 2. Twenty-one teams of three to five students participated. The designs ranged from the traditional to the modern, and included a rugby stadium and a house with a windmill.
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 six, the Band (Rebecca Corman ’13, Rebecca Reitz ’13, David Emanuel ’13, Yukun Gao ‘13), won the competition with a score of 64.67 (20.67 appearance score and 44 structure score), while team ten, the Competition (Dingyi Sun ’12, Bao-Nhat Nguyen ’12, Lingke Wang ’12, Mike Caron ’12, Anand Desai ’12),
was close behind with a total score of 63 (13 for appearance plus 50 for structure). Team 17, who built a replica rugby stadium, (Emily Hsieh ’12, Zuleyka Marquez ‘15, Natalie Klotz ‘14, Marissa Reitsma ‘14, Blair Station ‘12), finished in third with a score of 62 (20.67 for appearance and 41.33 for structure). In all, only
one of the 21 teams, team ten, survived the maximum time on the shake table.
