GREENVILLE — Mote & Associates promotes engineering, especially by celebrating National Engineer’s Week, which was last week, and once against continued the tradition of offering guidance to Chris Sykes’ Engineering Tech Prep junior and senior classes at Greenville High School to design and build a balsa wood structure for competition.
The competition was conducted Friday, with 12 Gantry frames (bridges) being constructed by teams of juniors and seniors.
As a result of the competition, the lightest frame built held the most sand in a bucket, thus won the entire contest with 22.512.86 percent efficiency. First place went to Jacob Hounshell, A.J. Bowers, Dylan Gilbert, Peter Pandey and Quintin Muhlenkamp. All are seniors with the exception of Pandey.
Awarded second place were Austin Grote, Brittany Weyrick, A.J. Frens and Jeremy Asbaugh, while third went to Ripley Lewis, Brandon Sykes, Scott Denman, Joseph Suter and Brandon York.
Sykes said he has 21 seniors and 29 juniors in his classes this year.
Greenville Mayor Michael Bowers was unable to attend but is expected to present the class with a proclamation declaring Feb. 21-27 as National Engineer’s Week.
Assisting Sykes this year was new teacher Adam Eberwein, who was one of Sykes’ students 13 years ago.
“I’m impressed,” said Chris Sykes. “We set some records here today. It was evident this year there was a lot of the thought process went on outside of school hours. It was a big group and it was neat to see juniors and seniors teaming up together.”
Eberwein added, “This was great. There are a lot of big projects we do here. We didn’t have all of this when I was a student here in 2003. I loved the contest. It put pressure on kids so they can feel what it’s like to do something and still have a quality product. It’s nice to see Mote come in and assist the kids with the design portion of it.”
Representing Mote & Associates at the competition were Dave Mathews, environmental specialist; Jaden Horner, who will graduate from college in May; engineer Mitch Pitsenbarger; and Matt Venable, engineering designer.
