IDEERS 2009The NARL's National Center for Research on Earthquake Engineering (NCREE) has organized annual events of international earthquake engineering competition under the program of Introducing and Demonstrating Earthquake Engineering Research in Schools (IDEERS) since 2001. The competition is to challenge students to design and make small scale models of buildings that can stand up to strong earthquakes. There were 100 teams of near 500 students from 14 countries participated in this year's contest that took place at the NARL-NCREE on September 28th. Among them, 16 teams were under the graduate level, 42 teams the undergraduate level, and 42 teams the high school level. Thirty teams were from abroad. Ju-Jieh Lin, an associate researcher of the NARL-NCREE, served as the chief judge for this year's event.
In the contest, the participants in the high school and undergraduate levels were required to complete the structural models in 6.5 hours. After passing the loading evaluation, the teams were qualified to enter the second phase of the competition. For the benefit of the audience and participants, the experts provided explanation and comments on the structures of beams and pillars, shapes of the structures, and earthquake resistant strength of the models. The submitted models from the high school and undergraduate teams were added with a 7.5-kg iron block and the graduate teams with a 10-kg iron block before performing the seismic test on the shaking table. Each model had to go through various levels of earthquake simulations until the model fell apart.
Under the high school level in this year's contest, Stella Maris Ursuline High School from Hualien County, Taiwan outperformed the runner-up team from Singapore, followed by San Francis High School in Taipei, Taiwan. In the undergraduate level, the top honor went to Singapore Team One, followed by Kao Yuan University of Taiwan, and Singapore Team Two. In the graduate school level, South Korea was the champion, followed by Hong Kong and Malaysia.
