Towering Structures
6th Graders: Today the 6th graders learned about structures and their various functions before building some of their own. There were three engineering challenges the 6th graders were faced with and they all required creative thinking to get through. Although many of the tasks seemed difficult at first, the teams collaborated and came up with sturdy structures.The challenges they were faced with were building towers out of marshmallows and spaghetti sticks, balancing textbooks on a single sheet of copy paper, and building a bridge out of straws.
In the first challenge, the groups faced difficulties in making their structure stand up but experimented with various designs and adding structural support, whether by adding diagonals or doubling the spaghetti sticks, to strengthen their structure. Two groups used a square base, while the other group used a triangular base, to make their towers.
In the second challenge, the teams experimented with different 3d paper shapes in order ti design a structure that could hold the most textbooks. The 6th graders realized that the strength of the structure depended on not only the shape they used, but also the width of their base.
In the last challenge, the 6th graders were faced with designing bridges made entirely with straws, two pieces of tape, and scissors. They applied what they learned from the lessons and previous challenges to build the strongest bridge. One group even added a creative holding design for the cup and ended up holding more than 200 pennies!
