1st in New Zealand, 2nd in Australasia 2017. That is Hagley College’s momentous achievement in the 2017 Aurecon Bridge Building Competition held in Wellington in late August.

This year, Aurecon changed the materials that could be used on the pre-built bridges. We entered the competition by constructing three pre-built balsa bridges. Two of the bridges were aimed at the efficiency prize and one at the strength prize.

As per custom, names were pulled out of an engineer's helmet to decide the order of bridge testing.

Once again, Hagley College was drawn first with team AI (ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE) built by Shannon Carlyle and Zoë de Mol-McCormick setting the tone of the competition with a 31kg bridge-breaking strength. Their brown bridge was almost the lightest in the competition weighing under 90g. After waiting their turn, team SREENIGNE (Engineers spelled in reverse, or reverse engineering as the Aurecon announcer put it) built by Olivia Davis, Charlotte James and Leni Wright tested their blue bridge, again a lightweight bridge of under 100g. Their bridge sustained 35kg of load before it failed. We were hoping that this result would consolidate our efficiency standing in the competition, which is calculated by dividing breaking strength by the bridge weight in grams.

In the last third of the bridges to be tested, came our heavy bridge from team BALISTIC BALSA (built by Thomas Johnstone, Michael Pascoe and George Tebbutt), a totally different designed bridge aimed at sustaining the maximum load they could squeeze out of it but also one of the heaviest in the competition. 

Immediately the bridge crept out of the single digits into the double digits. The announcer began to compare the changing load with his list of best loads from each competition centre. “You have just beat the best in Sydney,” he cried, as it crept past 50kg. “You have just beat the best in New Zealand” as it crept past 90kg. Then, “You have just beat the second best in Australia” as it crept past 103kg. The room was quiet and stunned, because the bridge still would not give up its secret. When would it break? It broke as the second strongest bridge in Australasia at 106.4kg. There was rapturous applause from the audience of school students and teachers. We were only beaten by one team in Melbourne, Australia, with a bridge with 129kg breaking strength.

Our school was awarded $1500 in prize money, with students getting gift cards.

Our teams were all elated by our successes, as was the teacher!