This week we led off with an Introduction to Engineering presentation and finished with a really cool structural project- bridges. Each team had to figure out how to span a bridge which was to be 12″ in length and 6″ in width. Things we learned to address are- what are our connections made of and why? What is a structural member in tension? What is a structural member in compression? Is it better to use more or less structural members and what is the argument for either? How do we accommodate our aesthetic wants with functional needs?
After hours of debate & many ‘what if ‘ questions, we tested our structures. We quickly came to realize that we did good work as our mentors had to find addition weights to load test our structures. Many structures went through multiple load tests to get them to eventually fail.
Our mentors on the structural side also left us with some great references:
http://www.thestructuralmadness.com/index.html
http://www.thestructuralengineer.info/
Congrats and good work to all of the students for their hard work, motivation and creative thinking.
