Creaks and groans from a bridge, built only with Styrofoam and glue, elicited oohs and aahs from about 25 high school students gathered at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette’s Rougeou Hall.
The students were participating in the week-long Gear Up Summer Engineering Experience hosted by the College of Engineering. On Thursday afternoon, they watched as ever-increasing amounts of weight were placed atop the results of several days worth of effort, and fun.
Steel L-bars that weighed 25 pounds were being stacked on a wooden platform that weighed 50 pounds. The bridge began emitting the strange sounds a few bars short of the 1,225 pounds that caused it to break.
“There’s a $300,000 lawsuit,” Chris Carroll, an assistant professor of civil engineering, called out good-naturedly when the Styrofoam bridge finally buckled.
Carroll, along with four graduate students, mentored the students, who were from Acadiana, Carencro, Comeaux, Lafayette, St. Thomas More and Teurlings Catholic high schools, and David Thibodaux STEM Magnet Academy.
“It’s fun to meet everyone and you get to clown around a lot, but it can be stressful,” said Ebna Leday, a senior at Acadiana High School.
Students spent the early part of the week solving cyphers, equations and riddles that provided clues for a scavenger hunt. The scavenger hunt, in turn, yielded project specs and other information needed to build the small bridges.
The competition was laden with financial and time constraints and incentives. Students were docked set amounts if they took too much time to complete certain tasks, or if they used too much material. There was a steep penalty if their bridges were not able to hold the required weight.
The objective of the program is to introduce students to engineering, and give them a feel for what working in the industry is like.
“We try to make it as much like a real-world scenario as possible,” Carroll said. “The students had to be conscious of cost, but they had to balance that with the realization that their designs can hurt people if not done properly.”
Adrianna Liebersat, a senior at Acadiana High School, has participated in the program before. She enjoyed it so much, she switched her original career plans from medicine to engineering.
“I want to be a petroleum engineer,” said Liebersat, who plans to enroll at UL Lafayette in Fall 2015.
Cory LaFleur, a senior at Carencro High School, said his favorite part of the week was spending time with UL Lafayette graduate students, “and learning from them, student to student.”
Jacob Benton, of Lafayette, a civil engineering graduate student, said the students can be “ pretty fun and entertaining. Some of them are characters.
“They like the hands-on approach. It’s not just us sitting at the board teaching them.”
Serenity Broussard, a sophomore at the David Thibodaux STEM Magnet School, agreed. “It’s a lot different than a textbook,” she said.