Carleton wins several awards at the 2023 Troitsky Competition
The Troitsky Bridge Building Competition is an annual national competition hosted by Concordia University where civil engineering students showcase their engineering knowledge, creativity, and innovative skills. In this competition, students are tasked with designing and building a meter long bridge exclusively made with popsicle sticks, glue, and dental floss.
During the weekend of March 3-6, 39 students from the Carleton Troitsky Bridge Building team competed to represent Carleton. Carleton’s delegation consisted of six teams of six people each, and three coaches. Carleton’s six teams got the opportunity to compete against 36 other teams from a variety of schools including McMaster, Queens, UofT, BCIT, Concordia, and many others.
Although teams are permitted to prepare sections of the bridge in advance, they must assemble their design within three hours on the day of the competition. Our Carleton team members have been working hard since November, preparing pieces of the bridge to ensure that the assembly process goes smoothly. Additionally, each team presented to a panel of industry professional judges to showcase their design and the methodology behind their designs.
Teams were judged based on a variety of factors including ultimate load, bridge weight, bridge aesthetic, spirit, and many other design specific constraints. On Sunday, students endured a six-hour long day at the “crushing ceremonies”. During this time, students watched all 36 bridges take on a hydraulic point press until they failed by breaking or deflection. All of the Carleton teams showed great enthusiasm by cheering on both their own teams, and other schools.
All of Carleton’s hard work paid off as the six teams confidently secured 8th, 16th, 17th, 20th, 26th, and 31st place with Carleton’s strongest bridge holding 743 kg before failure. Carleton walked away with four special awards: “Best Team Costume”, “Best Team Spirit”, “Most Beautiful Bridge”, and “Coaches of the Year”.
“We would like to give a special thank you to our amazing team captains who helped to revive the Carleton Troitsky team after two years of online competition: Isabelle Bouchard, Will Dodds, Dhruv Mitra, Eithin Pero, Anneka Petersen, Sebastian Wat and Sam Wilhelm.
Another special thank you goes out to our funding sources – primarily the CEE and MAE departments at Carleton. We were beyond pleased to see how enthusiastic the delegation from Carleton was about representing Carleton at competition and how excited everyone already is for next year!”
