Bridge Building

Yesterday while being 'Big Teacher' in the classroom I set the children the task of designing and building a bridge that could hold the greatest weight from a newspaper for an observed Maths lesson.  To start the lesson off I showed the children the different types of bridge that they could build and examples in real life.  One website really caught my attention and had the children engrossed while they spent 10 minutes at the start of the lesson researching how they were going to build their bridge.

Building Big (http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/buildingbig/index.html) is a website for an Amercian (I think) TV show and has detailed information on the building of bridges,  domes, skyscrapers, dams and tunnels.  There are detailed explanations for children on how the structures are built along with a few interesting games.  There are also links to other relevant websites on the Internet.

During the activity the children where 'charged' points for using sellotape and string etc but earned points for 'gap the bridge covered' and amount of weight it held.  The children came up with various designs including standard beam bridges, a truss bridge and a simple suspension bridge.  The maths came from the measuring, weighing and discussing of the best way to get the most points. 

The winning group produced a newspaper truss bridge with a small role of sellotape that held over 10kg!  Not that's not bad!