The Goethals Infrastructure Challenge: A Proposal for a New Student Competition

The American Institute of Steel Construction (AISC) and American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) Steel Bridge and ASCE’s Concrete Canoe competitions are a staple of civil engineering education. These two competitions provide a technical design problem for students to solve under very tight performance requirements, solution envelopes, and evaluation standards which tend to drive competitors to similar, optimized solutions. In contrast to these highly structured problems, both the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) and the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) report that the engineer of the 21 Century will also be called upon to solve extremely complex, daunting, and ill-structured problems. The authors and their institutions are currently developing the Goethals Infrastructure Challenge as a new student competition built around solving the social-technical, complex adaptive, and ‘wicked’ problems associated with designing, constructing, operating and maintaining the world’s infrastructure. This paper explains the organization of the Goethals Infrastructure Challenge, the student learning objectives for participating in the challenge, the annual process used to formulate the challenge, required funding mechanism, submission procedures, judging and evaluation plans, and budgeting and funding. In addition to being educational, this competition is designed to inspire a new generation of engineers to address the challenges we face in “restoring and improving urban infrastructure” and “providing access to clean water” as suggested by the NAE, managing the $2.2 trillion necessary to improve our infrastructure, and defining what infrastructure should be and do when functioning optimally in the knowledge-based, global economy of the 21 Century. For this reason, the challenge is named for George Washington Goethals who, with the building of the Panama Canal, transformed 20 Century infrastructure in the hope that this event will inspire the participants and the engineering profession to transform the 21 Century infrastructure in a similar way.