Guided by design teacher Parham Neal Pishko, Chesapeake Academy middle school engineers from sixth, seventh and eighth grades recently put their design skills to the test with a structural design challenge to build the strongest bridge.
After researching bridge designs and creating scaled blueprints with precise measurements, students built spaghetti bridges that spanned a 50 cm gap, weighed no more than 300 grams and met a series of engineering constraints, reported head of school Catherine L. Emery. For example, students could only use spots of hot glue and noodles and could not alter their noodles’ tensile strength by laminating or coating the noodles. Bridge footings could not attach to the table in any way, and the design had to be large enough to accommodate a hot wheel car. Minimum weight bearing for a passing grade was 2.4 pounds…..
