On March 17 Chestermere high school students entered and won first place in a welding competition called the Welding Rodeo.
The students who entered the competition were Austin Tober, Landon Lavoie, Cole Lewis, and Riley Munro.
The competition was held by the Catholic school board and the local oilmakers union, but allowed for students enrolled in the public school board at Chestermere high school to enter it.
“It went pretty well, we won,” said Andrew Autet, the shop teacher at Chestermere high school.
The competition consisted of four events including team sculpture, oxy-fuel cutting, pipe welding and a Canadian Welding Bureau (CWB) plate test.
“The team sculpture test was St. Patrick’s day themed,” said Lewis.
The oxy-fuel cutting competition required the students to cut out sheet metal with an oxy-fuel torch into four leaf clovers and it had to fit through a template.
The pipe welding competition had them take a piece of pipe and weld it to a piece of plate.
“It had to hold water to see if it leaked or not,” said Munro.
Chestermere took home first place in the team sculpture competition along with placing first in the competition overall.
The boys made a beer tap that said luckily on top and had a bunch of horseshoes and four-leaf clovers on the sculpture, and the handle on the tap moved as well.
All of the boys who competed in the competition are in grade 12, except for Lewis, and most of them started with welding when they entered high school in grade 10.
A lot of the boys want to go to SAIT in order to get their education, red seals, and journeyman designation in the trade.
Autet said thanks to the hosts of the rodeo for providing opportunities for students.
The students said the competition was very well put together, clean and organized.
“It gave them a shot of experiencing real-world skills, rather than just sit in a classroom,” said Autet.
They also said that there wasn’t really anything like that that they have heard of before.
The school doesn’t completely fund the shop program at Chestermere high school, and the students have to pay money to be able to do it said Autet.
This means that in order to be able to participate, students, have to pay extra fees, which may not always be available to them and may make them unable to participate due to lack of funds.
The fees include material costs and supply costs for some tools for the student.
