Severin
Zaluzec (left) and Henry Quach (right)
Two students from Garden Grove High School repeated as
top prize winners among 46 teams from 25 Southern California schools in the
annual Popsicle stick bridge competition sponsored by the American Society of
Civil Engineers.
Severin Zaluzec, a junior, and Henry Quach, a senior,
from the school’s Math, Engineering, Science Achievement (MESA) Club placed
first, winning a shared $500 scholarship that they generously donated to the
MESA club and the academic decathlon team at Garden Grove High.
The latest competition was held Feb. 16 at Union Station
in Los Angeles. Garden Grove High has participated the past five years and was
runner-up in 2010 and 2011.
Both
winning students plan to study engineering in college, Quach at UC Berkeley and
Zaluzec at Cal Poly Pomona.
Entrants from Orange and Los Angeles County high schools
engineered model arch bridges from Popsicle sticks held with white glue.
Winners were determined by the weight of the load each structure sustained
before collapsing. The winning bridge entry from Garden Grove High held 882
pounds of pressure.
Participants also were judged on a poster board,
technical paper and oral presentation before three engineers.
Sunny Costello, a district math teacher on special
assignment, serves as the adviser to the Garden Grove High MESA Club.
