I-beamer team video by Mike Tran


The I-beamers are back from the 22nd Annual Troitsky Bridge Building Competition held at Concordia University in Montreal. We went into the competition confident our design would beat all the teams. However, things were not meant to be. We finished a disappointing 18th out of 40 teams.

When our bridge tipped over at 80kg, we were in total shock. We were expecting something closer to 1100kg. Afterwards, one of the judges came up to me and apologized saying they just realized there was something wrong with the machine since the loading kept moving off center. Reza's team, who won the competition at Ryerson, failed at around the same weight as us. All bridges that were top loaded failed the same way; by tipping over, or twisting. In the end, of all things, a suspension bridge from Cegep Chicoutimi won.

After all the teams had their bridges crushed, we asked the organizers to crush our bridge again since it was largely unscathed from the first time. This time, we clearly saw the loader applying torque on our bridge, spinning and twisting it - something that's not suppose to happen.

We are going to fire off an e-mail to the Canadian Society of Civil Engineer (CSCE), who organized the event, detailing the problems with the crusher in the hopes the same thing won't happen again.

Meanwhile, if you were watching the Discovery Channel today, Reza's team was featured on the Daily Planet. I appeared for a brief moment in the background. I'll try to not let it go to my head.

• Official bridge building competition site with results