If you're having pasta tonight, then you'll probably be interested in what the students at the University of Belize are doing with their noodles.

The annual macaroni structural competition was held over the last two days to prepare and select three teams that will compete regionally. The teams each have five persons and the students hail from four fields: architecture, building and civil, mechanical and electrical, and construction technology.

Today they showcased the structures they created yesterday. Courtney Menzies was there and has this story.

Pasta noodles may not seem like the strongest building material, but with a little reinforcement and a lot of hot glue, they can hold up to 35 kilograms, about 77 pounds or at least that's what the students at UAB were aiming for today. The original macaroni structural competition is coming up in chetumal. And today, the aspiring teams showed off the structures they made yesterday, hoping for a chance to compete regionally.

The students were tasked to build a crane, and the coordinator of the competition explained the criteria they were looking out for.

Lloyd Carillo, Coordinator, Macaroni Structural Competition
"It basically goes with efficiency. If they use less material and hold on more weight, that is a very important criteria, because it is strong and versus something that you put all the material and hold on to that same weight the next one holds. So you have to see that see on that. Then we have the way how they design. How they do presentation or the audience liked it, which model did they love the most, And especially the judges. Us lecturers have to have an input on it."

For one team, Im-pastable Force they quickly realized the mistakes they made, and while they weren't selected to progress further, they said the experience was worthwhile.

Kenny Gongora, Im-pastable Force
"We had to design our macaroni crane first, which we had a little bit of trouble, so all of us put our head towards our drawings. We make sure all our forces were equally distributed throughout our whole a crane and we spent like an hour or 2 designing our drawing. And then we just did it to scale, started building it, which took us a really long while."

"We reached late. We procrastinated a little bit in the beginning, but then we still and then we still didn't have enough time. So we had to go with the flow and we didn't fully do our design we wanted to do so we kind of failed on that but we could have done better. The slips, the apparatus they use to test the stress of the the crane."

"It just slipped, slip, slip. So it's not our fault."

Reporter:
"So that must have felt so discouraging."

Kenny Gongora, Im-pastable Force
"Yes, because we couldn't even tell what was our weight limits."

Jezael Tillet, Im-pastable Force
"Building the project itself was very fun because we were teammates, we were cracking jokes. There were some mistakes which we had to correct as well. Getting scorched with our fingers, by hot glue over all it was a very fun experience. Hopefully we do end up going to Chetumal and if we do, we'll, make Belize proud."

And the team that placed first Macaroni Ninjas explained the work that went into building their crane and the mistakes they hope to correct.

Leonardo Ruiz, Macaroni Ninjas
"It was a lot of fun. We were here at school from 8 in the morning until 5 in the evening, so it's a full 9 hours nonstop working. It was a lot of arts and craft like. We had to break macaroni, glue them together, here we glued them in layers of seven. We had to make sure we had the glue inside everything."

"So it was nice and rigid. And from there we had some power blades that help us cut their macaroni and hot glued everything. Personally, I haven't touched a hot glue gun since primary school, so a lot of fun went into that."

Reporter:
"Did you suspect that you would have come out on top?"

Leonardo Ruiz, Macaroni Ninjas
"So for the moment, I say let's aim for third or fourth place so we don't have to go to Chetumal but after a while, we had so much fun that we actually wanted to win the competition and we were very pleased with our outcome. Primary issue is that in our crane rather than breaking it slipped off the machine and probably broke on the ground."

"So our primary issue is making sure that it can be clamped on well to the machine because there's a lot of momentum, a lot of bending moment that makes it rotate and fall off and personally with the design, that's why they have counter weights. But we weren't sure if we were allowed to add weights to the back."

"So that's something we need to look forward to."

And while they're trying not to be overly confident, Carillo explained that the Belizean teams always beat expectations.

Reporter:
"You think that when you get to Chetumal, that you'll come out on top there?"

Leonardo Ruiz, Macaroni Ninjas
"At least third place probably have so much fun that we'll want to win. So aiming for first place, of course, but we have to lower our expectations."

Lloyd Carillo, Coordinator, Macaroni Structural Competition
"Over the years we have won three times first place, one time second. Overall, we have stayed within 1st to 10th place we have never gone to the 36th position, never reached there. Last year was one that we won first and second place. We believe we took the third, but they didn't want to give us that by 0.1 of a gram."

Reporter:
"Is that a testament to the type of education, the level of education that these students are getting here?"

Lloyd Carillo, Coordinator, Macaroni Structural Competition
"Yes, it's a huge testament because we are here as associate level with the guys over there, the university over there is a bachelor's level, a much higher level than what we have here. Some of them are coming back to Belize and are going to be professionals. Some of them are in Mexico being professionals."

"So you have engineers, architects over there versus our associates degree students and we won last year so we could boast that too."

The competition will be held from 27th to the 29th of this month and three teams from Belize will be participating.

While the local record is 35 kilograms, today's first-place team managed to get their crane to hold 11 kilograms - or about 24 pounds.