RELATED: Clark State offering unique high school engineering program
If the bridges are designed properly, they hold a lot of weight.
“It is quite shocking for someone who has never seen it before how much weight these bridges can hold,” said Clark State Professor Cherish Lesko.
She said the program is unlike any other in Ohio and gives students hands on learning.
“This program is different from most engineering camps because it is a true engineering course at a top level,” she said. “This is the same course that freshman at John Hopkins takes their freshman year.
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“It’s not just playing and building stuff for fun,” Lesko said. “They learn how to process data and write lab reports. They take quizzes and final exams just like the students at John Hopkins.”
The students attend high schools in Clark, Champaign, Logan, Greene and Montgomery counties.
The top team Friday was Alexandra Fellie and Jaykob Cave-Stevens. Fellie is a student at Xenia High School and Cave-Stevens goes to Springfield High School. Cave-Stevens said he has enjoyed his time in the program and their secret to success was sticking with a plan.
“It is a great opportunity,” he said. “From the start, we had a pretty set design and we stuck to it. We were not messing around with this or that.”
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Fellie said their design wasn’t complicated but effective.
“It was a very simple truss bridge and those tend to distribute the weight more evenly,” she said. ” When I was putting the weights on I was like, ‘Oh, I don’t know how this is going to turn out.’
And though seeing the bridge finally fall can be disheartening, Cave-Stevens said he was happy with the result.
“It was better to see it come down at like 30 pounds and not 5 pounds,” he said.
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