White Swan High School students in Lonnie Hall’s construction class recently learned a little bit more about teamwork in the real world of manufacturing during a regional construction competition known as Construction Challenge held at the Master Builders Association in Bellevue Washington on Feb. 7.
Construction Challenge is an educational initiative designed to stimulate young people’s interest in fields such as engineering, carpentry, general construction and architecture because of a growing gap in trained personnel within this field that is expected to peak by the year 2012, due to a large number of baby boomer retirements.
White Swan High School students competed against various high schools on the west side of the state in three key areas as part of the regional challenge—infrastructure presentation, manufacturing and design and service tech simulation. 
The infrastructure presentation component of the challenge required students in Hall’s class—grades nine through twelve, to meet with Department of Transportation Officials in Union Gap to learn about a pressing problem regarding snow sheds and how they can affect both the economy and the day-to-day lives of motorists driving to work. White Swan High School sophomore Sarah Boyle learned from the visit that a snow shed is a fortress tunnel that protects roads from snow slide avalanches emanating from mountains during melting temperatures and that some of them in Washington state don’t cover enough of the lanes in the road to prevent closures.
“One of the snow sheds they showed us only covered half of the lanes in the road—the two west bound lanes,” Boyle said. “Trucks that try to ship stuff can’t get through on the uncovered lanes and so businesses that need to get goods to stores so the stores could sell it, couldn’t and so they lost money.”
Boyle said that she learned from DOT officials that these kinds of infrastructure problems cost the state’s economy millions of dollars per day. To simulate how real life engineers would solve the problem, the students put together a before and after cardboard replica model of a snow shed only covering two west-bound lanes and then one that covered four out of five lanes for their presentation. White Swan High School students received a second place prize from Construction Challenge judges for their infrastructure presentation at the competition.
“We went and got information from the Department of Transportation on past snow shed projects—a lot of the older ones were smaller and allowed snow to get in the road. The newer snow sheds cover the entire road and then the snow coming from the mountains goes into nearby waters rather than blocking the roads,” Boyle said.  
In the service tech simulation competition, the students were engaged in an exercise where wires on a fake machine were deliberately wired wrong, tubes were not placed in the right location and the wrong shape of PVC pipe was placed on the mechanism. The students followed a schema showing the correct arrangement of parts on the mechanism and only had 15 minutes to fix their machines properly. White Swan High School students took third place in this competition.
In the final category, the manufacturing design competition, White Swan High School students were given a variety of objects to choose from that they could use in combination to build an instrument capable of transferring golf balls and wooden blocks contained in a large cardboard box into their own separate containers labeled “Worksite A” and “Worksite B” to earn points. The students chose to thread pieces of clothesline through a plastic tube and attach a little electric box to the clothesline in an attempt to fish the balls and blocks out of the larger box and into the separate “Worksite” containers. Students who used fewer materials to make an instrument that would transport the balls and blocks received additional points at the end the competition.
White Swan High School in Lonnie Hall’s construction class are currently scheduled to attend a national Construction Challenge Competition in Knoxville, Tenn. on May 19. They need to raise $8,000 to go the Nationals. Those interested in donating should contact Lonnie Hall at White Swan High School.