The World Civil Engineering Olympiad - WCEO aims to bring civil engineering into secondary schools and colleges, drawing their interest to become civil engineers. Similarly to other disciplines’ International Olympiad schemes (Mathematics, Biology, Chemistry, Physics or Economics), WCEO Organizing Committee has designed a set of events regarding several areas of expertise within the scope of the practice of civil engineering. Such initiative was presented during WCCE’s 14th General Assembly held in Lisbon in September 2019, becoming endorsed to be replicated globally. On such grounds, WCCE has published WCEO's competition guidelines to foster the competition globally and make kids become aware of the role of civil engineers worldwide.
In the 2017/2018 academic year, a pilot experience was carried out at the University of Granada (Spain), in which only local centres participated and which tested the Olympiads’ events and dynamics, pending the competition’s budget and scoring system to be developed. The following year, three more Spanish Universities (La Coruña, Ciudad Real and Granada) launched a national stage among their local winners, which resulted in the Ciudad Real representative. The initiative in Spain is almost consolidated by the incorporation of several other Universities (Burgos, Cartagena, Alicante and Valencia).
After WCCE’s involvement, the goal is to enforce its development and become replicated in several countries fostering regional competitions.
Any civil engineering higher education institution, public administration or professional associations regardless of its membership to WCCE may request joining the project as potential partners. Any secondary school or college may apply to any of the project partners to participate in the local classification round.
WCEOlympiad is to be staged in three rounds: local, national and regional. Such stage will be hosted by the partner organizations between the months of January and April annually The local stage is to be held at the partner’s venues, whose winner team will classify to the national round as the partner’s representative. The national stage will be held at the venue of the current winning team, which will host all local stage winners. This national stage is to be held in the last two weeks of May of each year. The winning team of the Olympiad will host the following years’ edition.
WCEO’s events have been designed by teachers from the different partner organizations and are intended to test the wit and intuition of the teams. Although the difficulty of the events is dissimilar, all of them foster the development of skills such as teamwork, leadership, adaptation to media or limited work tools, problem resolution, all of them core to the professional practice of civil engineers.
All competitions (local, national and regional) comprise 6 Events, which will be carried out by all the teams with the same resources available in all the participant venues. The competition should take no further than four hours on a single day.
- Event 1: Construction engineering.
- Event 2: Structural engineering.
- Event 3: Hydraulic engineering.
- Event 4: Graphic engineering.
- Event 5: Freight transport & logistics
- Event 6: Project & resource management.
The Events must be carried out in compliance with the established requirements and using the material available. Event samples can be consulted in ANNEX I to this document, which includes the events that designed for the Olympiads 2019/2020 edition in Spain.
