The Civil and Environmental Engineering Students' Society of the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST) held today the final round of the Secondary Schools Bridge Demonstration Competition 2011, in which Maryknoll Convent School won the championship. Meanwhile, Carmel Pak U Secondary School won the Best Presentation Award.
The aim of the Competition is to promote the interest among secondary school students in the design and construction of civil engineering structures. Each team is required to build a small scale model of a suspension bridge that can withstand a weighted trolley running across it from a height. The team with the strongest bridge will gain the highest score. Judging is also based on each team's presentation about their experience in building the bridge.
The two other schools that made it to the final round were Tsuen Wan Public Ho Chuen Yiu Memorial College and St Stephen's College.
The Chief Judge, Prof Christopher Leung, Head of the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, HKUST, said, "The winning bridge is robust in all aspects and there is no apparent point of weakness. It is remarkable that without formal training in structural engineering, the students were able to produce this outstanding piece of work based on intuition and repeated trials."
Miss Heidy Ng of the Maryknoll Convent School team said, "We gained some very valuable experiences in the process of this competition. We gathered lots of reference materials online about famous bridges in the world, and in particular we made reference to Hong Kong's Tsing Ma Bridge and the Golden Gate Bridge of San Francisco, USA. The challenge for us was to produce the bridge from very limited materials supplied by the organizers - mainly some fragile pieces of wood. Nevertheless we managed to produce a sturdy bridge out of these, and the feeling was wonderful!"
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