Sophia Popova '11 and Kenneth Leveille '11 (at right, with bubbles) were the makers, captains, and, ultimately, victims of their own small craft in the Yale Engineering Design Team cardboard boat race on September 15. The undergraduate group holds the race every year, partly for sheer fun, partly to give students some hands-on design experience. Participants have four hours to build a two-person craft out of cardboard and duct tape. "You get a pretty good idea of the engineering principles involved in building a boat," says Design Team president Jonathan Hartman '09, "when you put it in the water and it tips over because you left something out."

Some boat builders had prepped with complex physics equations, but Popova says she and Leveille built by intuition. They wanted a canoe-like boat with a wide base; other than that, "we absolutely didn't really know what we were doing." It worked, though. They finished the full half-lap in Payne Whitney's main exhibition pool afloat and without help -- only three out of eight boats managed that -- and tied for first place (47 seconds). After winning, says Popova, "we sat in it until it finally sank."