Inquiry: Testing Our Spaghetti Bridges

Last week for inquiry, we finally got to testing our spaghetti bridges that we had spent the last few weeks constructing. This task was to be done in a group of four, so everyone got into pairs, and were assigned our remaining two teammates. Sanujan and I almost immediately got into pairs, and were given our teammates Jericho and Te Ponamu. We worked really well together, and managed to construct a 25.5 cm long bridge made of nothing but spaghetti, rubber bands, and tape. The specific type of bridge that we had chosen to do was a truss bridge. Not too hard, although not too simple. We knew that the strongest shape was a triangle, so a truss bridge was a perfect selection as it includes many triangles in the structure. So we went ahead starting construction, and had a lot of fun throughout the journey. Then came testing day. In this test, we would have a bag that we would fill with bricks. After each brick, we would record our data and move on. Your objective was to hold all eight bricks without the structure of your bridge collapsing. After many bricks, my group managed to come up to six bricks. We then placed our seventh brick, and unfortunately, our bridge broke. Our bridge manages to hold six whole bricks without the structure breaking, I was truly blown away by how well it managed to be. This was such a great challenge for all of us.