Greensburg Salem teams sweep pasta bridge competition at Saint Vincent

Greensburg Salem School District swept the top three spots in Monday’s 14th annual Pasta Bridge Engineering Competition at Saint Vincent College.

Juniors Adam Nichols, 16, and Kevin Burkhardt, 17, both of Salem Township, took first-place honors when their model bridge, crafted from various types of pasta and glue, stood up to 38 pounds and 8 ounces of weight before buckling.

Nichols said the span took two months to build — starting with the twin arches, which the pair crafted from small segments of spaghetti they joined in multiple layers to “distribute the force equally and not have one point of breaking.”

While the teammates consider the spokes the strong point that won the competition for them, they believe the 60 thinner pasta spokes that connected the arches with a deck constructed from lasagna were the weak link that ultimately failed.

“A spoke had snapped on our ride here to Saint Vincent,” Nichols said. “We put bracing on it to try to eliminate the fracture, but that didn’t seem to hold up in the competition.”

The pair’s bridge was not only the sturdiest, it won a second award as most aesthetic in design among the 21 bridges entered by teams from nine area high schools.

Local sponsors supply high school teams with the pasta and glue needed to build a bridge. The completed bridge must not exceed 1,000 grams, or a little more than 35 ounces.

Stacy Birmingham, who chairs the engineering programs at Saint Vincent College, said participating students “learn to work within the idea of engineering constraints” as they attempt to design a bridge that will hold as much weight as possible.

“They learn about bridges, which bridges are strongest,” she said. “They learn to design, and they learn how to prototype and test their designs to see which bridge will work the best.”

Nichols and Burkhardt, who are contemplating careers in biomedical engineering and aeronautical engineering, respectively, prepared for the Saint Vincent competition by creating alternate bridges from paper straws and plastic straws. The bridge exercise was part of an honors course in physics at their school, where they learned about a variety of subjects, including civil engineering, nuclear medicine and particle physics.

As they were building their bridge, the pair agreed, the biggest lesson they learned was to be patient but not to procrastinate.

“Maybe I can use something like my skills here with my handiwork to craft something that could be used in surgery and help save people’s lives,” Nichols said.

The Hempfield Area team of 2011 holds the competition’s record, creating a bridge that withstood a weight of 109 pounds.

A member of that team, Vickie Hawkins, who works as a mechanical engineer for Matthews International in Pittsburgh’s Bakery Square, attended this year’s event as a spectator.

She declined to provide an unofficial critique of the 2020 entries.

“I have opinions, but sometimes they’re wrong,” she said. “You never know.”

A team from Hempfield Area won this year’s award for best engineering.