FOR ADDITIONAL INFORMATION ON THE CONFERENCE: Contact Cliff Lawson, president of the UNLV student chapter of the American Society of Civil Engineers, at 656-6396.

Concrete canoe races and a bridge-building contest will be among the highlights of a regional conference of engineering students that will take place March 29 - April 1 at UNLV.

The UNLV student chapter of the American Society of Civil Engineers will host 16 other university chapters from Arizona, Southern California, and Hawaii in the student organization's Pacific Southwest Regional Conference.

For the steel bridge competition student teams will be building scale model steel bridges capable of holding 2,500 pounds. The bridges will measure approximately 18 feet in length and 4 feet in width. Students will be judged on speed of construction, the cost of materials, the aesthetics of the structure, and the weight of the bridges.

The steel bridge competition will take place at 9 a.m. March 31 in the new baseball parking lot at the northwest corner of campus.

The concrete canoe competition involves the designing, building, and racing of canoes constructed from Portland based cement. The student teams will be judged on aesthetics, technical design presentation, and performance.

The canoes will be float tested at 8:30 a.m. April 1 off campus at Lake Las Vegas near Henderson. The canoe races will begin at approximately 9:15 a.m.

Students at the conference also are competing in writing technical design papers. This year's topic is high speed rail transportation.

Other events to be held during the conference include a Popsicle stick bridge contest, a quiz meet, a house of cards contest, a surveying competition, and an impromptu design contest.

Because the conference rotates among the member chapters, it probably will be at least 15 years before the meeting returns to UNLV.

For additional information on the conference and its contests, call 656-6396 or 798-9250.