College hosts high school bridge breaking competition

Thunder Bay — The snapping of balsa wood and the crashing of metal weights from dozens of hand-made bridges resounded in the Confederation College's TEC Hub on Tuesday.

The destruction of many months' worth of hard work for grade 9 and grade 10 students was part of the final round of a bridge-breaking competition organized by the college’s Civil Engineering program and the School College Work Initiative.

It offered 45 students the chance to test their creations until failure and win the vote of a panel composed of the college’s engineering faculty.

“Students have been building bridges in their classrooms and I’ve been going into the classrooms and breaking bridges to determine a winner,” said Lesley Dell, the program coordinator of the Civil Engineering Technician program.

“So today with us, we have all of the winning teams from 15 different classrooms from across the city with representation from all of the high schools.”

Over the fall semester, Dell said nearly 375 students designed bridges at their schools – each receiving tool kits with instructions on building a bridge out of balsa wood and glue.

One-eighth of these students made it to the championship, which was split over two days. Students rebuilt bridges from their original designs last Wednesday and returned to break them on Tuesday.

“I really love the competition because we get a real unique array of designs. The students are very creative in what they come up with and it’s really great to see and test their hypotheses to see how the bridges perform and they perform quite well,” said Dell.

Dell said students not only gained experience in team building, stress, resilience and managing through failure but also learned about compression, tension and general parameters that come with stability equilibrium in civil engineering.

Alessia Berardi, a grade 9 student at St. Ignatius, participated in the competition. She said her team built the bridge in their grade nine tech rotation.

“We didn’t think we were going to make it here, but we did. We had a design and we just fixed it up a little bit and then came and built it,” said Berardi.

Berardi said that when building the bridge, they tried to use many triangles and make it as light as possible. 

“It’s very like fun to get out there in school and go and do other things besides work because you learn a lot from coming here. We came here four times and for the Jill of all trades when we came here. And, it’s been very fun,” said Beradi.

When tested, she said they hoped their bridge would hold at least eight pounds or higher.

Kingston Aylward, a grade 10 Seventh Fire Secondary School student, also participated in the competition for his school’s science class. He said his team’s bridge met their expectations and carried 28 pounds, not divided by their weight.

“We did a lot of different styles into our bridge. We did a lot of arches. A lot of lower structural things to make it push the weight to the outside and yeah, it was really fun,’ said Alyward.

However, he said when building the bridge, he learned it takes a lot of teamwork.

“It really showed me a lot of what goes into making bridges and roads and, like, all that stuff for structural integrity. It’s pretty cool,” said Aylward.

Aylward said he would probably consider going into engineering when he is older but is mainly interested in becoming a mechanic.

Employers of graduates of the college’s technology programs donated the prizes alongside the college and sponsored the competition.

The bridge-breaking competition has run at the college for the last three years.