This year, Iowa State students had a chance to celebrate “Fat Thursday” when a design class sponsored a Homecoming Mardi Gras Parade.

The parade was actually a class project for Creativity 129, a class taught by Bill Boon, professor of landscape architecture.

“It’s just something fun to do during Homecoming week,” said Heather Kliebenstein, junior in environmental science and Homecoming special events coordinator.

“It’s something that hasn’t been done before, and Bill Boon offered to do it and we said ‘Sure, we’ll give it a try,'” Kliebenstein said.

Boon said the project was designed to test the creative and logical thinking abilities of the students.

He said the class was split into groups of seven to 10 students. Each group had to think of an idea for a float that fit in with the parade’s theme, “The Face Off.”

During the building process, students had to keep a log of their progress to be handed in at the end of the project.

“It’s hard to grade a project like this, but the grades will probably be [based] mostly on the notebooks that the students keep,” Boon said.

In creating their floats, students had to get everyone involved in the actual parade in some way, but they were only allowed to have one person carry the float.

Boon said the students also were required to use a piece of cardboard of a given dimension in some way in the float.

The parade was held at night, so the students had to light the float so it could be seen by spectators.

Boon said there was one advantage to the requirement.

“Students don’t have to finish the [entire] float, just the parts that will be lit,” Boon said.

He said student activity fees covered a small part of the construction costs, but the students had to come up with the rest of the funds from their own pocketbooks or by getting a business to sponsor them.

Kliebenstein said the parade started in front of Gilman Hall and ended in front of the Memorial Union.