Thomas A. Stewart Secondary team wins engineering challenge
Largest turnout ever for annual Peterborough high school competition
CDs, elastic bands and dowling, all these materials and more were used by Peterborough area high school students in an engineering challenge Tuesday at the Evinrude Centre.
The annual challenge was hosted by Ontario Association of Certified Engineering Technicians and Technologists Peterborough and Professional Engineers Ontario Peterborough to mark National Engineering Month.
Students were challenged to create an elastic band powered machine out of a variety of objects including CDs, dowling, popsicle sticks, styrofoam, tape, hot glue, two sizes of pulleys, copper wiring, metal axles and axle mounts and of course the all important elastic band.
They did not have to use all of the materials available to them to create their machines.
The goal was to see how far their machines could go in a strait line while encountering obstacles like like a teeter-totter and a steep incline.
Eight high schools with 157 students competed, including every high school from the city was represented along with several teams coming from the schools of from Lakefield College School and St. Stephen School from Bowmanville.
It’s the largest turnout ever for the event, one organizer said.
Team 11 from Thomas A. Stewart Secondary School won first place in the competition, with their machine getting 75 points on both runs.
Second place was Team 42 from Adam Scott Collegiate and third place was Team 39 from Lakefield College School.