To encourage and promote creativity through hands-on projects to senior high school students and undergraduate students in the Civil Engineering related fields, the National Center for Research on Earthquake Engineering (NCREE) and the British Council in Taiwan have jointly organized a seismic design competition, which will be held on September 24 and 25, 2005, based on the Earthquake Engineering Competition developed by the Earthquake Engineering Research Centre at University of Bristol, United Kingdom. Each participating student team must design and construct a small model of a building using strips of wood, sheets of paper, hot melt glue, and cotton strings. The building model must have at least four horizontal floors and must be able to carry 7.5 kilograms or more. The total time allowed for model constructing is 6 hours and 30 minutes including lunch time and breaks. Once the building models are completed, the judges will check whether the models have met the structural requirements and the weight of the models will be recorded. Weight penalties will be applied if the models do not meet any of the structural requirements. Severe violation of the rules resulting in structures not within the spirit of the competition may cause disqualification. All of the qualifying entries will then be fixed to the shaking-table at NCREE for model testing under earthquake loadings. The performance of each building model will be scored based on an efficiency ratio, which is calculated by dividing the intensity of the largest earthquake a building model survived by its mass.