Sarah Farou, 12, of North Kingstown, looks over her team’s bridge design. The program also gives students lessons in map reading and how to get from place to place, to underscore the impor- tance of the transportation infrastructure.

The Providence Journal / Gretchen Ertl

It was bridge-building time for the middle school students enrolled in a summer program at the University of Rhode Island.

We’re not talking about the metaphorical bridges of understanding between different cultures. These were real, albeit small, bridges made of balsa wood, no more than 5 inches wide and 23 inches long. Each bridge would be tested by seeing how much weight it could support, and the sturdiest bridge would be the winner.

The middle school students were attending a Summer Transportation Institute offered by the URI Transportation Center, a two-week program financed by the Federal Highway Administration and the Rhode Island Department of Transportation.

“We’re looking to introduce these young men and women to careers in the transportation industry, just to make them aware of what’s out there,” said Jeffrey Cathcart, director of technology transfer and outreach for the Transportation Center.

URI offers two sessions of the Summer Transportation Institute, one last month and one this month. Eighteen students are enrolled in this month’s session.

In addition to the middle school program, the URI Transportation Center also has week-long summer academies aimed at high school students. One is geared for business, focusing on supply chain management, one for engineering and one for construction.

Middle school students visited T.F. Green Airport, the Kingston train station, a Department of Transportation maintenance facility, and the Boston Museum of Science. They toured Narragansett Bay aboard the Sea Princess. And they built their bridges.

“It’s hands on, it’s visual. They’re creating, designing and building. And there’s that added element of competition,” Cathcart said. Cathcart said that in the five years URI has offered the middle school summer program, the most weight a balsa wood bridge has ever supported was about 24 pounds. Besides strength, the bridges over the fictional “Upper Cascadilla River” had to look good and come in under budget.

The students, divided into teams, wore iridescent green highway vests with “URI Transport Center” printed on the back. Cathcart said the vests not only looked sharp, but they made it easy to keep track of everyone on the field trips.

The students started out by designing their bridges on computers, using a program called West Point Bridge Builder. “It’s cool software,” said Dalton Kell, 12, of North Smithfield. Kell said one of his math teachers — and his mother — mentioned the summer program to him. “I’ve always been interested in engineering, so I thought it might be a cool camp. And it is,” he said.

The students were working with truss bridges, which are essentially formed from a series of triangles. The Bridge Builder program allowed them to send trucks over their bridges, with areas under stress turning red. The deeper the red, the more the stress, so the students were trying to keep the red as pale as possible. The program also let them deliberately collapse their bridges, which provided considerable amusement.

Once the bridges had been designed, the students printed out the results, and went to work creating full-scale blueprints on big sheets of paper.

Helping Cathcart supervise the students were Elizabeth Snead, Brandon Brown and Janice Nickelson. Nickelson, a retired teacher from North Kingstown, said she’s worked with Cathcart for the last three summers. She taught fourth grade, but she’s married to an engineer. “My husband tutors me at night,” she said.

At a front table, Tyler Tao, 13, of South Kingstown, was working with her team on what’s called a bowstring truss, in which the supporting triangles are contained within an arch. Tao said she heard about the program through a flyer passed out at Broad Rock Middle School. “I’ve always liked building stuff — this is the first time I’ve built a bridge,” she said.

Jason Hathaway, 12, of Wakefield, and Julia Davis, 14, of Foster, were working on a structure loosely inspired by the old Jamestown Bridge. The bridge looked impressive, although Cathcart thought its height might work against it when it came to bearing weight.

Davis, who will shortly be moving to McLean, Va., said her father spotted a flier for the program. It looked interesting, she said, so she decided to sign up. Davis said she’s particularly concerned with ways to make transportation more environmentally friendly, decreasing global warming, and helping to protect the planet. “This is giving me some ideas that might help me in the future,” Davis said.

After finishing their blueprints, the bridge-building teams received thin rods of balsa wood to use as their beams, and started cutting them to size. Then they wielded glue guns to attach the pieces of their bridges together.

Randy Alsabe, 12, of Providence, said his team started with a shape called a Howe truss, and then added more material they hoped would provide additional strength. “Essentially, we put two designs on top of each other,” he said.

Alsabe said his father, a civil engineer with the Rhode Island Department of Transportation, suggested he try the URI program. “He showed me something about this, and I thought I’d give it a shot. Turns out I like it,” he said. “They give you new experiences. You get into the depths of stuff you don’t normally think about.”

Cathcart said the program gives students some lessons in map reading, and how to get from place to place, to underscore the importance of the transportation infrastructure — such as bridges.

The visits to Boston, T.F. Green airport and the train station, and the voyage on Narragansett Bay, he said, give students a look at the transportation world that the general public doesn’t usually see. (Cathcart said this year’s T.F. Green visit included a look at the CVS corporate jet, a lightning fast Cessna Citation X.) “Most of the kids who come into the program only know cars, maybe buses. Only 20 percent have ever been on a train, only 20 percent have ever ridden the subway,” said Cathcart.

Ben Hall, 14, of South Kingstown, said he particularly enjoyed being able to get a behind-the-scenes look at the airport, something that’s not that easy to do these days. Hall, whose father, Roger Hall, is a science teacher at Pilgrim High School in Warwick, said he originally applied for the URI program last year, but was a little too late and all the spots were filled. So he tried again this year, and got in.

“Unless they know someone in one of these [transport] industries, these kids would have no idea about these careers,” Cathcart said. “This is one way to show them. As they grow older, and decide about going to school and what career tracks to take, they might remember some of this.”

asmith@projo.com