St. Mary’s Dominican High School’s engineering team came in 2nd Place at the Louisiana Collegiate Design Competition (LCDC) held February 14-15 at Louisiana State University. The state competition drew seven high school teams and 20 college teams from around the state.
Dominican’s engineering team members were seniors Victoria Chan, Oliva Cheung, and Mia Nguyen, and 8th grader Meredith Kononchek. Coaches were Kenneth Lannes and Crissy Giacona. For the competition, each team had six hours to design a Rube Goldberg machine to pop a balloon. A Rube Goldberg machine is a machine intentionally designed to perform a simple task in an indirect and overcomplicated fashion. Often, these machines consist of a series of simple devices that are linked together to produce a domino effect, in which each device triggers the next one, and the original goal is achieved only after many steps. Rube Goldberg was an American cartoonist, sculptor, author, engineer, and inventor.
LCDC is hosted by the Society of Peer mentors from the LSU College of Engineering. LCDC is a student-driven, student-organized engineering competition focused on developing skills in leadership, teamwork, networking, and applying engineering knowledge for its participants.
St. Mary’s Dominican High School engineering team, (from left), Coach Kenneth Lannes, Victoria Chan, Mia Nguyen, Meredith Kononchek, Olivia Cheung, and Coach Crissy Giacona.
