Students prepare for shelter competition

  Tuesday, April 12, 2016 2:00 AM
  News

Pittsburg, KS

Students from Pittsburg State University are teaming up with students from Gyeongsang National University in South Korea for this year’s Samaritan's Purse Disaster Shelter Design Competition.

Hosted by John Brown University in Siloam Spring, Ark., the annual competition challenges students from across the country to construct rapidly deployable transitional disaster shelters that could be used in a refugee scenario.

This year’s design competition is based around a scenario “in which victims have fled and have little or nothing by way of physical belongings, specifically the refugee crises currently in progress in the Middle East and Eastern Europe with Syrian and Afghan refugees fleeing to the mountains of Albania and Macedonia.”

One team of Pitt State students and two GNU teams are working together in preparation for the competition, which takes place April 21-23. The South Korean students are on campus this semester as part of an exchange program.

“We’re very excited to have three teams competing in this year’s competition,” said Assistant Professor Norman Philipp. “It’s fun to see our School of Construction students working together with the GNU students.”

Senior Cody Wilkins, a PSU construction engineering technology major from Webb City, Mo., said he enjoys working with the South Korean students on the project.

“It’s a great experience for us, not only because of the challenges the competition presents, but also because we learn a lot from working with the GNU students,” he said. “We certainly are working hard to try to win the competition, but what is most important is the education we receive by taking part in this.”

The shelters, which will be built on site at John Brown University, will undergo a variety of tests during the competition. They will be tested for heat retention, water and wind load assessment and for how well they’d hold up in an earthquake.

“The idea is that these shelters could truly be used by refugees, and they’d need to be able to withstand the elements,” Wilkins said. “This is real-life stuff, so the challenge is certainly intense.”

For more information about the competition, visit http://www.jbu.edu/shelter_contest.