Knowledge and attitudes development through didactic competitions: Spaghetti Bridge Contest at UBI

The main objective of the Spaghetti Bridge Contest promoted by the Department of Electromechanical Engineering of the University of Beira Interior (Portugal) is to encourage the creative capacities of students and improve their attitudes towards learning. The knowledge acquired in the Applied Mechanics course is applied in the project of a bridge built with such a common material as spaghetti. This annual event aims to increase the students' interest in research providing ingenious solutions to problem. Up to date, the contest had twelve editions; it is precursor in Portugal of similar events organized by other institutions of Higher, Secondary and Basic education levels. This paper presents the evolution of the event since its origin, regarding both the solutions found by students to consecutively beat the resistance records, and the motivation in participating in such a didactic contest devoted to engineering education