Western hosts 2023 Concrete Canoe and Steel Bridge competitions

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This week, Western will host the 2023 Canadian National Concrete Canoe Competition (CNCCC) and the Canadian National Steel Bridge Competition (CNSBC). The CNCCC and CNSBC are annual competitions that bring together students from schools across Canada to share their engineering passion. This year will have an international feel with teams from Japan, Mexico, the USA and Puerto Rico also sending teams to compete.

The CNCCC began in 1995 and sees students spend an entire academic year designing and building a concrete canoe to compete in multiple categories and races. This year they’ll be racing their canoes at Fanshawe Lake.

"This type of competition is critical to ensuring continual improvement and innovation and really fosters a sense of community within the civil engineering profession."
- Peter Tomaszewski, 3rd-year Civil Engineering student

The CNSBC was launched in 2016 and asks students to design and fabricate modular steel bridges. During the competition, held at Kinsmen Arena, teams will assemble their modules into a 24-foot-long bridge on the clock to determine their construction score before load testing their bridges both laterally and vertically. 

“These competitions require students to actually build their bridge or canoe,” says Dylan Dowling, co-chair of the CSCE Student Competitions Committee. “This means they have to act as not just design engineers, but also as material scientists, project managers, fabricators, and constructors, and learn how to make their theoretical designs into reality along the way.”

“It’s a place that fosters innovation and creative thinking in a safe environment, one where students can try new things, see the impacts of those decisions, and adapt their designs and products without putting people or property at risk. As a student, you rarely see your design actually built; here, teams not only build it, but they put it to the test and get to see how their design works!”

CanoeSteelBridge-body.jpgPeter Tomaszewski is a third-year civil engineering student and lead captain of the Western Engineering Steel Bridge team. 

“Participating in this competition, and being captain of the Steel Bridge team, has been both amazing and humbling,” says Tomaszewski. “As a team, we have learned a lot of hard skills related to engineering and bridge design, such as the effects of different designs on bridge stability and efficiency, some of the procedures used by professionals to evaluate potential designs and simulate the performance of a structure under various loads, and the fabrication methods used in real life construction projects.”

“Personally, I’ve been given a lot of chances to develop some of the essential soft skills needed by a professional engineer, and to come face to face with my strengths and weaknesses. I’ve learned how important it is to have a team to depend on, which types of communication work poorly and which work well, how to notice when someone needs training or teaching in order to complete a task, and many other lessons that you just can’t quite learn until you go out and try to do something outside of the classroom.”

The 2023 Canadian National Concrete Canoe Competition and the Canadian National Steel Bridge Competition will run from May 10 – 13.