Students construct bridges of pasta

High school students used spaghetti and hot glue to do a job usually done with steel, stone or concrete at the seventh annual Spaghetti Bridge Building contest Tuesday at Jefferson Community College.

The competition featured 125 students on 27 teams from 11 schools in Jefferson, Lewis, St. Lawrence and Oswego counties. Students from computer-aided-design classes and engineering classes made up some of the teams. Others were students who just wanted to try their hands at spaghetti bridge-building.

The teams designed and constructed bridges with 24-inch spans, made of spaghetti. Program coordinators tested each bridge by attaching a bucket to the structure to determine how much weight each bridge could hold.

The winning team was one of the three teams from Pulaski. The team's bridge had a 19.5 load-to-weight ratio, meaning the structure could support more than 19 times its own weight.

Pulaski High School technology teacher John E. Cheney said he was confident that if his teams could finish the bridge on time, they would be the winners. The three Pulaski teams took first, second and third places. The top three teams received $100, $50 and $25 prizes.

"It's well worth the effort and it's good for the kids," Mr. Cheney said. "And the hope is that these kids get interested enough to go into engineering one day."

And many enjoyed facing off against their peers.

"Competition brings out the best in the students," General Brown High School technology instructor John A. DeGone said. "And you drive over bridges every day, and you may not even realize it's a bridge. This is meant to open their eyes to the everyday kind of thing, too."

General Brown team members said they were excited to take part in the competition, and to spend some time away from school, especially on one of the last days before the Christmas break.

"It's a lot of fun to do this," senior Devon R. Meunier said as he and his three teammates began to assemble their bridge. "And we don't have to be at school all day."

Mr. Meunier said he hopes to go into engineering and will attend JCC in the fall.

"The goal is really to teach high school students how to construct a structurally sound bridge," said Christopher A. Heaslip, a second-year engineering student at JCC and leader of the engineering club, which hosts the competition.