Spaghetti was on the menu Friday at Okanagan College as students across the Okanagan Valley brought their utensils and hot glue for the annual bridge-building competition.
The students were challenged to create the best bridge made almost entirely of spaghetti.
“To be able to have so many young brilliant minds in one spot, knowing that our future is in their hands, it’s incredibly inspiring,” said Okanagan College president Dr. Neil Fassina.
This was the 38th annual contest and the return of the competition for the first time since March 2020.
It encourages students ranging from elementary to post-secondary to use STEM skills, which may hopefully motivate them to pursue a career in that field.
“This is an experience to be able to highlight just how important the sciences and the engineering fields are to things like the infrastructure that we often take for granted,” Fassina said.
Get breaking National news
“Whether or not it’s our bridges, our roads or things of that nature, this is just a chance to celebrate those science, technology, engineering and math-based programs.”
In order to withstand the competition, students used a variety of strategies and explained how important it is to work together as a team.
“It’s fun cause there’s a lot of teamwork and everything, a good way to get to know people,” said student Macie Hill.
Daniella Plaxton said one of her favourite parts is being alongside her friends, “It’s a very team-effort competition. If you’re not all working well together you lose a lot of time,” said Plaxton.
Although his bridge was falling apart, one student shared his building plan. “We built our base and now we’re building our supports and we’re doubling up our spaghetti,” said Benjamin Roodzant.
However, some of the kids didn’t have a set plan in place before they got to the college.
“We didn’t really know what we were gonna do today so we just like looked at some videos,” said Adanna Ezikwu.
After some arguing, one of the groups got it figured out. “Honestly, just kind of like go with the flow. If it works, it works. If it doesn’t, we tried,” said Simeona Molloy.
After the building was complete, students had their bridges tested. The goal was to see if the bridges would crack under pressure.
“We actually start to test their structures so we’ll start putting progressively heavier weights on the bridge to find out how much they can actually hold,” Fassina said.
Comments