Bridge Design

Topic: Bridge Design

Project: Bridge Construction and Testing

Academic Area/Skills:  Structural Engineering, Use of a triangle as a strong building foundation, Use of Playground App on iPad

Materials: iPad app- Playground, Video on Bridge Types (BrainPop! has a great one), Toothpicks and Marshmallows, Toy Cars

We began this unit by watching a BrainPop Video all about bridge designs. We learned the basic types of bridges- Arch, Suspension, Beam, and Truss and how forces act upon bridges. We observed different shapes found in bridge designs. Next, we used the app Playground to design various bridges. We experimented with different materials and shapes to see which would be the strongest.

The following class, we used toothpicks and marshmallows to build our own truss bridges that could support a toy car going over a pretend river! Students were reminded of how the triangle shape was the strongest when building and we practiced building a triangle out of toothpicks and marshmallows. We learned that the toothpicks represented the sides of a shape and the marshmallows represented vertices.

Students did better than I could have expected! Every partner group was able to build a bridge strong enough to support a car! Not only did they build a strong bridge but I was very impressed by their designs.