Thursday 5 October 2017

Engineers in the making in year 2!

Class LH have been learning about towers and bridges as part of the "Towers, Tunnels and Turrets" topic.  We have been looking at structures and what makes a good tower and what makes a good bridge.  

Towers

"We made towers from spaghetti, marshmallows and sugar cubes.  The sugar cube towers were tricky as the brown cubes weren't flat so they made a wonky tower," Betsy commented. 

Teddy said, "The white sugar cubes were easy to stack as they were flat."


One of the highest towers!

Using our heads to work out how to create a taller tower!

Ella noted that is was difficult to join the spaghetti with the marshmallow because the spaghetti snapped. We used the 200g weights to start with. 

Using marshmallows as junction pieces to form the shapes, we were able to start adding height to the towers. 

We talked about how some structures looked like square based pyramids. 

Great concentration and using teamwork to help each other. 

Bridges

We talked about the suitability of different bridges, the materials they were made from and what obstacles they were used to get over.  We used newspaper and spaghetti to create bridges.  George M said,"We were seeing how strong the bridges were and we used weights to see how strong they were.  I needed to change my bridge to make it stronger."  

This was a great problem solving attitude and he wasn't alone in altering his design in order to improve it and make it stronger.  Many of the children used great problem solving skills to work out how to make the bridges stronger to be able to carry the weights on them.  The strongest bridge was able to carry 800g!

 Testing the bridge at the official "bridge testing site".  

Many of the bridges worked at the tables but then we discovered that they didn't all carry the weight at the official bridge testing site!  India observed that the gap was wider than they had been using at their tables.