Students at Baldwin Preparatory Academy's construction program traveled to Las Vegas and won second place in the National Association of Home Builders' (NAHB) competition for construction management in February.

Scott Larson, one of the building construction instructors at Baldwin Prep, went with a group of seven students to attend the competition. Each of the students are set to graduate this May, and many of them Larson has worked with for two to three years. Even though Baldwin Prep is still in progress of its first year being open, Larson had several of the students in his project management class in Robertsdale.

After finding out that everyone in his class was interested in going to Vegas, Larson said the class spent their first semester "going through the nuts and bolts" of estimating costs for labor and materials and scheduling a residential build.

The students who went to Las Vegas to present and be on standby to present included Tucker Andrews, Parker DeWise, Brevin Lappe, Hatcher Minshew, Connor Parckys, Cleighton Strickland and Aiden Wood. Other students who helped put the project together, but did not go to Las Vegas, included Armando Garcia, Jada Gray and Conner Lanham.

The competition worked to give the students a hands-on application of things they may or may not have learned in the classroom that are important to know when working in residential construction. Larson said learning each component of the process "makes every step easier" in construction as you'll know what needs to be taken care of and in what order.

The competition assigned the same build to each participating school. The house was already built, but students had to work to fill in the missing pieces of information such as the costs and timeline for construction. Students were allowed to consult businesses in the home's area or their own local resources, but they could not contact the home builders directly for information on the project.

The students said the research for the project involved a lot of phone calls to companies.

"We spent months just calling companies and trying to get as much information as we could," Parker DeWise said.

Each of the students agreed this gave them a more accurate answer to some of the missing information. Overall, Baldwin Prep was $4,000 off from the correct estimate. DeWise said some teams were $100,000 off.

"In all fairness, we actually reached out to actual companies and asked them these questions that the other teams probably just guesstimated," Aiden Wood said.

Larson said the component, he believes, that lost the team points was the handwriting on the drawings for the project. He said Baldwin Prep currently doesn't have the technology for digital CAD drawings. Everything had to be done "the old-fashioned way" by the students.

"They had to calculate the area, they had to calculate perimeters," Larson said, "they had to go through and then calculate how many studs, how much sheetrock. They just had to do it the old-fashioned way, you know? Just one by one by one."

Several Baldwin County companies came and spoke with the class on some tips and tricks when it comes to calculating costs and timing. The students even took a field trip to Swift Supply to work on this project.

"We definitely did a lot of groundwork to be able to get to where we were and get second place," DeWise said.

Each student felt they learned something new and had new experiences at the event, whether it was "high-tech toilets and showers" at the Builders Show onsite or competing in and placing in the top three at Baldwin Prep's first NAHB construction competition.

"I think we were pretty excited to win second place our first year out there," Larson said. "It's a really good group of students that participated. This is a motivated group. I think when they get out in the real world or go on to secondary school, they'll all do well."

Larson hopes to have the technology next year for when he plans to take next year's senior construction class to the same competition.

While some of the students who participated don't plan to work in this type of construction after graduation, other students found out they enjoyed the nuts-and-bolts side of construction and plan to work towards something involving cost and timeline estimation in the future.