Thursday, January 08, 2015

The breaking point

Ruth's Challenge B class at CC is participating in a regional science fair in Austin next month. The kids have been working hard for the last couple of months, researching and preparing their experiments for the event. Ruth originally planned to do an experiment to test the antibacterial properties of several common products. However, when we got ready to register her experiment, we found that it was super complicated, because of the potential health hazards. Rather than jump through all the crazy hoops, Ruth decided she'd rather change projects. Around that same time, she discovered that she had an interest in civil engineering, so she chose a bridge building/destroying project. She has driven the whole project and has done all the research on her own. She spent weeks building four amazing bridges out of popsicle sticks...for the sole purpose of destroying them. She wanted to see which bridge design was the strongest, and today was testing day. We all had so much fun guessing which bridge would be the strongest and watching the destruction of each of them. They all held more weight than we expected, but Ruth's prediction was correct: the truss bridge was the strongest. We are so proud of her hard work and are looking forward to seeing the final project come together in time for the science fair next month!

Beautifully built bridges: arch, beam, truss, suspension

testing the arch bridge 

beam bridge

And the winner is...the truss bridge!

surprisingly strong suspension bridge

No comments:

Post a Comment

Say what you need to say