Today wraps up our week-long camp at Chadwick International where I had the pleasure of teaching an Engineering camp to 6-8th graders. Our challenge was to create a bridge to span a 36cm gap between two desks that could hold 20 pounds/9kg of mass.
Day 1
We focused on understanding the problem, our materials and how others had approached building bridges.
Day 2
We worked on designs and built a design by da Vinci, which involves no fasteners or glue at all! It gave us a different way to think about transfer of tension and compression forces. Students then chose the design they wanted to work on and formed groups. We started drawing multiple views of our selected designs.
Day 3
We finished up our final designs with multiple views and measurements, and then started working on building our bridges. We found that having detailed designs was helpful so that we could go back to them and see sizes and quantities of the parts we needed.
Day 4
This day was dedicated to building, as we needed to get everything finished in time to test on Day 5. Our goal was to be ready for destructive testing by halfway through the final day.
Day 5
Today marks the end of the camp, and while one team was ready to test at the deadline, our pre-fab team didn’t finish assembly in time for all the glue to dry adequately.
