Chester engineering student builds winning stick bridge

Mikayla Dieterle of Chester built the winning entry in SUNY Orange's end-of-semester Bridge Breaking contest on Dec. 6.

Her popsicle stick bridge withstood a load of nearly 300 times its weight before failing.

In the 20th annual contest, 22 engineering students from the college's statics class designed and built lightweight bridge structures using popsicle sticks and glue as a semester-long project. The structures were then put to the ultimate test to determine, based on a weight-to-load ratio, the strength of each one.

The bridges were securely placed into a cantilever assembly at one end, and weight was added incrementally to the other end of each student’s bridge until the structure collapsed. The students then calculated the ratio of the weight of the added load to the original weight of the structure.

Statics is the branch of mechanics concerned with the analysis of loads acting on physical systems that do not experience an acceleration, but are in static equilibrium with their environment.

Rounding out the top three contest winners were Cameron Laroche of Greenwood Lake and Evan Smith of Huguenot.

"The annual bridge breaking contest allows students to take what they have learned in the classroom and put it to the test," said John Wolbeck, professor and chair of the engineering program. “It is not enough for an engineer to just copy existing designs. They should improve, beautify, strengthen, or make a design more affordable.”