AUBURN -- Five students from Green River Community College are building the ultimate efficiency vehicle.

It's light-weight, coming in under 75 pounds. It's easy on the ozone layer because it's powered by human energy. And, made mostly of paper, it's biodegradable.

While the students must work with those requirements, they get to choose what their vehicle creation will look like.

``It's a way-oversized tricycle,'' said Kellie Harlan, trying to help people picture it.

It will be the Green River college team's contribution to the seventh annual Intercollegiate Human Powered Paper Vehicle Engineering Competition at Eastern Washington University this weekend.

On a sunny Friday afternoon, the team of engineering students was just starting to put together the vehicle that they hope will win the competition. In the Kevin Keith's garage, the Green River students consulted their drawings and tried to figure out how the sketches would translate into a tangible object that can hold the weight of a human and race around a track without falling apart.

Falling apart was their problem in last year's engineering competition. The vehicle design they came up with, which looked like a scooter with ski poles, lost its wheels going up a ramp on the track. Despite furious duct-taping mid-race, the device didn't even make it to the finish line.

But the team intends to change all that with this year's race, and their team name reflects their desire not only to finish, but to win. They are ``The Bride,'' as in always a bridesmaid, never a bride. They plan to wear wedding veils during the race and focus on having fun as much as winning.

``Most engineers are ...'' Harlan trailed off.

``Not as cool as us,'' Ron Easley filled in.

The idea behind the competition is to go beyond the theoretical, said Keith Turpin, a mechanical engineer who designed the contest. He was a senior at Eastern when he came up with the idea. Turpin was looking for a cheap, challenging and fun way to get engineering students in small schools involved in competition.

``We wanted students to learn the difference between theory and practice,'' Turpin said. ``You can take a design that looks great written down ... but in practice, it may not build well. It may not function the way you want it to.''

The contest should teach the students lessons they need to know now, not when they're working on a million-dollar project in the professional world, Turpin said.

He also just wanted to give engineering students a way to loosen up and have fun.

``They get into it for the `oh, wow' factor, then you get into class and you study math for three years ... and it gets really old,'' Turpin said.

The contest has grown over time, going from four teams at two schools to 15 teams at eight schools around the Northwest.

In the Auburn garage, the floor is strewn with duct tape, string, bottles of Elmer's glue and donated paper products. The five teammates are putting together the wheels of their vehicle by gluing white poster board on a thick, compact paper with a stronger consistency than cardboard.

They are measuring, drilling and in the midst of a confab about whose legs will be long enough to reach the pedals by the time they've put their vehicle together. It's a crucial point, considering the event requires three of the team members to ride in or on the vehicle for 100 meters each, and that theirs is shaping up to look like a giant version of a bike.

``They learn that what you do on the drawing board isn't always what comes out,'' pointed out team adviser Jeff McCauley.