<b>ABSTRACT</b></br>

The contests involving the development of glued wood structures represent a motivating challenge for the students. These

activities are rightfully included in the field of active learning or Project Based Learning. The advantages of these kind of

contests is its low cost, especially when compared to other similar contests such as Formula SAE or others. This makes

these competitions affordable to all students. Furthermore, these competitions are more civil engineering oriented.

Surprisingly enough, in most of the competitions the academic performance has a lot of room for improvement. This is

mainly due to the fact that they were considered more as a promotional event than a useful teaching tool, especially in the

first editions. In the work presented in this paper, the technical aspects of these contests have been studied in order to

improve, as much as possible, the learning aspect of those events. In order to do so, a review of the current state of the art in

those contests is performed. After that, some technical considerations on the possibilities that those contests allow are

developed. This is done while keeping, as much as possible, the reduced costs of these events. After that, the

recommendations have been put into practice in a real scenery and some conclusions are exposed. This has been made

via a pilot experiment where a student has been asked to analyze the glued-wood structure that it was developed by him in a

contest.

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<b>ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS</b></br>

We would like to thank Prof. Jesús Cuadrado Rojo for all the facilities provided in order to carry out the tests with the resources available at the Construction Engineering Laboratory of the Escuela de Ingenierıía de Bilbao, belonging to the UPV/EHU.

The authors of this work would also like to thank the economic support that in a direct or indirect manner has been given by the Investigation Groups recognized by the Basque Government under sections IT 781-13 and IT 947-16, the Spanish Ministry of Economy and competitiveness through the project DPI2016-80372-R (AEI/FEDER, UE).