There was a lot of emphasis put on insulation values, thermal mass, and temperature differential. Half of the dog houses were like 20 pounds and open to the air on all sides. We put a 150 lb garden on top of ours to act as a heat sink and then insulated all the walls of the dog house. We were able to keep 10 degrees below ambient after 3 hours out in the sun.

The rubric also put a ton of points on the technical report which seemed like an after thought for most people but at the end of the day it was an engineering competition so the whole point was the technical portion and the dog house display itself was kind of just the fun bit. We did really well just because we bothered to do all the requested calculations on life cycle cost analysis, heat losses, carbon balance, etc.

Our final product looked like a tank, but it won by a long shot.