2021, the annual science engineering challenge had begun. Since this year I was in Year 9 I was able to finally attend the challenge. The challenge was open for anyone who was in year 9/10. The science and engineering challenge is where schools from around the state come and compete in a series of events. Then after all the challenges are over the points are added up and the winner is declared. This year we managed to achieve an overall place of second.
The way this works is, prior to the day of the challenge teams are chosen at your school and events are selected. There were many different types of events. Some being; Future Power, Bridge Building, Coding, Light Messages, Bionic Hands, Drones, Water Wheels and Hovercrafts.
Drone 
Bionic Hand 
Future Power – Wind Turbine 
Hover Craft 
Bridge 
Water Wheel 
Code and light sequences
The more complicated the event the more points it is worth. The bridge building was depicted as the hardest task. Because of that I knew you would put your best students to work on that event, I just never thought that would be me.
The Overview of What Happened
I was in a group with my good friend William C and my other friend David D. I was glad to be with these two students because whilst I probably had the most engineering experience by far, William had first hand experience with balsa wood (When building gliders) and David was the perfect person for any maths or stress equations.
The bridge competition was where you need to build a frame to support a segmented metal sheet, that then will have a trolley roll over it with increasing amounts of weight.
The description of the event 
The rules and scoring of the event
Bridge
The night prier to the event I studied assorts of industrial bridges such as the truss bridge, but then also some older bridges like Leonardo Da Vinci’s self supporting bridge. I then also started looking at the physics and stress points of a bridge and how to support them. After all this research I felt as if my team and I would have an upper hand.
The next day on the bus my team and I discussed bridge designs to try and see which ones would hold up the best. Below is one of our first designs, whilst it still had many flaws, our other designs where on paper and I no longer have a copy of them.
The Day of the Challenge
When we got there we spent a good 40min just planning our bridge. I felt that all the other teams that just got straight into building their bridges wouldn’t preform to such a high standard. I was correct. Most bridges ran out of materials, time or just fell to pieces. We measured everything and draw a scale drawing with all measurements and angles attached. This helped us greatly throughout our build. I was so lucky to be at such a great school because both teachers and students where a constant morel support, and we couldn’t have done it without them.
Whilst there was just 3 of us in our team and we where all year 9’s we managed to beat the majority of the other 10+ schools. Who all wisely put their best students (Most where teams of 5 year 10’s).
But in the end out bridge was about ~130 grams and held ~1kg. The winning team held about ~1.2kg. This placed us with a second place for the bridge competition and helped us achieve an overall place of second. The reason our bridge failed was because one of our internal structural aches snapped resulting in a weakening point. I feel that it was great that our bridge broke structurally not just because of tape (Like many other teams). We did very well compared to other teams who some bridges couldn’t even hold the mail steel track for the trolley.
Skills I Learnt and Expanded
During this challenge I took leadership and helped to guide my team to victory. We all had to greatly use our problem solving capabilities and I used a lot of visual imagery to design and test our bridge. We learnt more of time management and organization. I am very glad that we “measure twice and cut once” because unlike other teams we manages to have no inaccurate cuts. We also had great collaboration and teamwork throughout the build.
Conclusion
In conclusion I really enjoyed the day. It was so much fun and it was great to expand my engineering knowledge. If I was to do it again I would use more tape because we didn’t know how much 10m was and so used it sparingly. This lead to some weaker joins.