Local students are building large structures out of canned food at the University Park Mall. The event is part of the CANstruction Jr event to raise awareness about hunger.

Eight structures will be built in the mall's center court.

Members of the public can vote by bringing a can of food and placing it in the bin next to their favorite structure.

"We're building Dory from Finding Dory and we used blue cans that we had bought from a company. We have about 2,000 cans in ours, we might have a little bit more. We had to set up different teams, there was a design team, a marketing team and then a can count team," said Rachel Rupert, a junior at Penn High School.

The official judging for the competition will happen Thursday.

Sunday evening, the structures will be dismantled and the cans will be donated to Hope Ministries in South Bend.