2021 2021: UMass Dartmouth and Bishop Connolly High School students hold engineering competition

Students teamed up to create a bridge building competition to test engineering design principles

UMass Dartmouth’s Engineers Without Borders, made up of engineering students, partnered with Bishop Connolly High School (BCHS) to host a Bridge Competition where BCHS students got to showcase their engineering knowledge and skills by building model bridges. These model bridges represent a variety of bridges that would be built in the workforce by engineers and were judged for their quality and different strength abilities.

UMass Dartmouth supplied the materials and software for students to experiment with before building their bridges. Shane Almeida, a junior engineering student at UMassD judged the high school student bridges for their structural integrity and aesthetics.

The winning bridge for structural integrity was awarded to Rylee Lopes, which had a mass of 65 grams and held 72 pounds of paper. Nathan Sousa won the most aesthetically pleasing bridge award.