Lincoln-Way Students Compete In Bridge Building Competition

FRANKFORT, IL — Every year, students at all three Lincoln-Way schools build a model bridge and test its strength in the annual Bridge Building Competition. The school said students were given a kit with 15 two-foot pieces of basswood and specifications for this year’s contest.

Using glue, students design unique concepts and test its strength by seeing how much weight it will hold before it breaks. The bridge with the highest structural efficiency wins, the school said.

The contest is open to all students, but the majority are those in physics and engineering classes.

The top four winners from each school will go on to compete in the regional contest at the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago Jan. 28. The top two in that competition will represent the region in the international contest in spring 2020, the district said.

The top four students from each school were:

• Lincoln-Way Central: Kenneth Harris, Kaitlyn Bittner, Hannah Luming and Matt Stillman.
• Lincoln-Way East: Jacob Falejczyk, Jackson Seida, Tori Entwistle and Davey Fitzpatrick.
• Lincoln-Way West: Sydney Swanberg, Isabel Tuckett, Dylan Wasilewski and Carly Kaiser.

“This has been a great tradition and the students did a great job in participation and effort,” Lincoln-Way East Physics teacher Michael Murphy said in a release. “It is great to see the students work on projects outside of the classroom that relate to topics learned in the classroom. It was obvious from their designs and results, that many students devoted a lot of hard work and time into this project. It seems that this project sparks the creativity of a lot of students and fosters hard work and creativity.”