Four Peoples Academy students recently won the 40th Troitsky bridge building competition in Montreal with their adviser, Karsten Weiss, who teaches design and technology at the school.
Peoples was the first high school to be invited to this college-level engineering competition and PA students competed against 38 college and university student teams from all over Canada.
In addition to being the only U.S. team, the Peoples’ team was also one of only two all-girls teams.
Peoples Academy, at both the high- and middle-school levels, has performed well in the five Vermont Technical College competitions it has participated in since 2017.
At Troitsky, out of 39 teams, PA scored in the following events that determined the overall winner:
• Aesthetics and Originality: 8th place, less than two scored points behind the winner.
• Adherence to Required Dimensions: 6th place; only one penalty point.
• Team Spirit: 8th place.
• Predicted Load Carrying Capacity: 6th place.
• Team Presentation: 3rd place — the team received lots of compliments.
• Strongest Bridge: 2nd place — the bridge held 5,099 pounds, more than last year’s strongest bridge at Troitsky.
• Structural Efficiency: 1st place — PA had the 6th lightest and second strongest bridge.
• Overall Event Placement: 1st place with 92.77 out of 120 possible points.
The second-best team, from British Columbia, scored just below 81 points, though it did have the strongest bridge of the competition this year.
Additionally, Peoples placed first for Most Creative Design and second for the People’s Choice Award.
Peoples’ students could not attend the awards ceremony since alcohol was served and the team left for home even before the crushing of the bridges was completed. After receiving an urgent phone call, they attended the Sunday evening award ceremony virtually from various locations in Vermont.
The students’ bridge took 18 months to design and build.
The next local competition will be held at Vermont State University-Randolph (formerly Vermont Technical College) when Weiss will take six sixth-grade students to the middle school competition on March 28.
(1) comment
no picture of the bridge? come on[yawn]
Welcome to the discussion.
Log In
Keep it clean. Please avoid obscene, vulgar, lewd, racist or sexual language.
PLEASE TURN OFF YOUR CAPS LOCK.
Don't threaten. Threats of harming another person will not be tolerated.
Be truthful. Don't knowingly lie about anyone or anything.
Be nice. No racism, sexism or any sort of -ism that is degrading to another person.
Be proactive. Use the "Report" link on each comment to let us know of abusive posts.
Share with us. We'd love to hear eyewitness accounts, the history behind an article.