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Students in professor Karen Horton’s freshman civil engineering technology class spent the last few weeks designing and building bridges out of pieces of file folder stock. On Tuesday morning, they destroyed them.
For the last five years, Horton’s class has held a competition to see which of these bridges can hold the most weight before they buckle under the pressure.
“It fulfills a wide range of the mechanical engineering technology program’s objectives for the course,” said Horton, who hopes to continue the contest in the future.
Each student in the class was assigned to a group for the project, and they spent time in and outside of class preparing their bridges. The bridges themselves were quite small, variously colored and not much more than 1 foot in length. Each group chose its own design and structure, hoping to build a stronger bridge then their competitor’s. One student mentioned that his group spent about 10 hours just in construction.
“The time to build the bridge varied by team, but each team selected the part sizes and built the bridge during a one-week period,” said Horton.
The students spent a great deal of time in preparation for the few moments when their bridge was tested, building a wide database of information before choosing which construction designs would provide the greatest amount of strength. The bridges were crushed slowly by pressing down on them with incrementally increasing amounts of force. This allowed the students to find the precise amount of force the bridge could withstand before breaking. After this experiment, most of the groups crushed the bridge outright. One student took his group’s bridge and stood on it, flattening it.
The three winning groups out of the six participating were awarded extra points on their final project grade, with 15 points going to the winning team of students Chris Atwood and Brandon Markie. The second-place group received 10 extra points, while the third-place group received five.
Groups ranged in size from two to four students each. Some came up with a group name, like “Big Red,” which used only red file folders to construct their bridge.
“[The students] wrote team contracts defining their own rules for norm and goals, leadership, communication and decision making, and responsibility,” Horton said.
Students also had to agree to a group-based grading. Some of the students enjoyed the project, but “other students expressed less enthusiasm,” said Horton.
The students are called upon to exercise a wide range of skills in this project, said Horton.
“Students applied skills in computer-aided design, spreadsheets, physics, engineering design and engineering testing,” she said. “They also applied and demonstrated good teamwork skills, followed written instructions describing how to build the bridges and made PowerPoint presentations describing their design and fabrication techniques to the class.”
The competition was held 11 a.m. Tuesday in the basement of Boardman Hall and attracted several spectators from various members of the local press. The winning teams were announced officially later that afternoon, and a display giving information on the winning bridges and teams will be on display in Boardman Hall this week.
Bangor Daily News