BUILDERS: St Catherine’s Catholic College, year 8 students Olivia Paterson, Brooke Bignold, Tom Baxter and Jessika Scott work on their bridge building skills for the Aurecon Bridge Building Competition.
THREE year eight students at St Catherine’s Catholic College are relishing the opportunity to prove girls can tackle engineering tasks with just a little bit of help from their male counterparts.
The students Olivia Peterson, Brooke Bignold and Jessika Scott and their mentor Tom Baxter have entered this year’s Aurecon Bridge Building Competition.
Aurecon is a major international engineering company currently working on projects in Australia including the Dalrymple Bay Coal Terminal in Queensland and the upgrade of facilities at the Melbourne Cricket Ground.
The aim of the bridge building competition is for year eight and nine students to gain some insight into engineering as a career prospect.
St Catherine’s Catholic College, science teacher Alicia Jenkins said the competition provided students with the opportunity to develop creative and problem solving skills.
“We had an in class competition to find who would represent the school in the statewide competition and the three girls were selected,,”she said.
“Assisting them in their task is mentor Tom Baxter.”
Each school in the competition is provided with the bridge making material consisting of 16 pieces of balsa wood sticks of varying length, one cardboard tube, five metres of string and some epoxy glue.
From that assortment the students must build a bridge meeting strict structural designs requirements including a bridge span of 650mm, the bridge must be no wider than 140mm and the width of supports at each end must be 25mm.
That sounds like one very hard task so best of luck to the students.