STEM
The Bridge Builders
We had an excellent day at Pine Rivers SHS on the 6th of March learning about the role of Civil Engineers and how bridges are designed.
We learned about the importance of geometric shapes, particularly triangles, in bridge designs. After completing tower and bridge construction challenges using paper, we were able to work with our group to design and build our own bridge using paddle pop sticks.
When we were building our bridges we needed to try and include some strong shapes, especially triangles, to give our designs extra strength. We also needed to think about offsetting the layers of our paddle pop sticks so that the bridges didn’t end up with any weak points. The bridges needed to be at least 30cm long, and we could use a maximum of 250 paddle pop sticks per group.
At the end of the day when our bridges were tested, 2 groups had bridges that were able to support 4kg of weight without breaking. We were amazed that our paddle pop bridges were so strong! We did notice that the bridges that were able to hold this amount of weight all made use of cross bracing and offsetting construction techniques, and there were strong triangles in the designs.
We all had a great day and learned a lot about building strong bridges.
Thank you Pine Rivers SHS.