Wednesday the 13^th of April nordBEC 2011 has officially started.  The opening began with a formal ceremony in an auditorium of the Natural Sciences building. In the previous evening all the teams had received their welcome packages, which included the event’s very cool t-shirt.  Most of the participants wore their dark blue t-shirts on the first day of the competition. The organizer and co-organizers had light blue t-shirts and the core team had aqua blue ones, so that they could be easily distinguished from each other.

Fernanda, the coordinator of nordBEC 2011, gave a brief presentation about the organization BEST and the concept of the European BEST Engineering Competition, which nordBEC is part of. It was followed by welcome speechs from Per Martin Sandtrøen, head of student council, Trond Smaavik from NITO, Norway Engineering and Technologist Organization and Knut Fagerbakke, Deputy Mayor of Trondheim. Gaston and Dias, the main organizers of nordBEC, were also present ready with practical info.

The day’s activities followed with two parallel competitions, Team Design and Case Study. Each of the categories with 8 teams consisting of 4 people, in a total of 64 participants.  The Case Study Topic Director, Mangesh, gave the participants of the Case Study competition a short introduction to the task that they were supposed to complete within five hours.  The Team Design Topic Director, Pradeep, gave the introduction of the task for the Team Design competition.

In the Case Study competition the students were asked to evaluate a case where a major multinational furniture company had found out that their subcontractors in South Africa used child labors to produce rugs. The teams were asked to propose a plan of action to the company and a broader solution for the child labor issue in a general scale. It was a modified case based on a real story.

In the Team Design competition the teams were asked to use their engineering skills to build a bridge with a limited amount of materials, as paper and glue.  The bridge had to span a space 50 cm wide and 80 cm high. The primary objective was to build a construction that would support a maximum load of cans.

Besides the main competition, a miniBEC (mini BEST engineering competition) was organized to challenge the students at NTNU as well. The task was to build a helicopter out of paper and throw it from a one floor height.

After the time was up, the Case Study teams used their presentation skills to present their innovative solutions to the jury.  The bridges from the Team Design were loaded with cans to see how stable they were under weight, all bridges hold to the maximum load. All in all, the teams did a great job in both competitions!

The great effort of the day was celebrated by many team members and organizers with a beer in bar in the center of Trondheim in the evening.

Thursday the 14th we will have the second Case Study and Team Design competitions. We will come back with more news soon!! Keep tuned

See more pictures here.