In High-School, some of my engineering classes counted as college credit through RIT.  For one of the projects in this class, we did stress analysis on trusses and had a competition to see who could create the lightest bridge the could hold a certain weight.  By performing tensile and compressive testing on standardized cardstock members, and doing both manual and computer simulation, we were able to determine the strength needed in each member and whether it was tensile or compressive. My bridge ended up the best optimized, having the best strength to weight ratio and winning the competition.