Vietnam has made it into the top three at an earthquake engineering competition, held in Taiwan earlier this month.

Students at Duy Tan University, located in the central city of Da Nang, won the third prize at Introducing and Demonstrating Earthquake Engineering Research in Schools (IDEERS), an earthquake-resistant house model design contest, the Vietnamese higher education institution told Tuoi Tre on Saturday.

IDEERS was organized from September 14 to 15 by Taiwan’s National Center for Research on Earthquake Engineering, the British Council in Taipei, and the UK's University of Bristol.  

Duy Tan students finished in third place with a house model made up of wooden bars and sticks, glue, and rubber bands.  

Shaped like a seven-story building, the structure boasted four main piers, four subsidiary posts, a flexible foundation, and floors linked together via peripheral pillars.

The entire design was created in six hours and expected to sustain magnitude-8 earthquakes, Dang Ngoc Long, a Duy Tan student, said.

The competition was attended by 99 teams from many countries. The Vietnamese team defeated rivals from reputable universities like the National University of Singapore, the Republic of Korea’s Pusan National University, China’s Shantou University before grabbing the third prize.

Duy Tan University ranked seventh in the 2012 IDEERS competition where 102 teams competed.