The Bridge Project

The Bridge Project  is the brainchild of our Head of School Dr. Dan Greenwood. It is an amazing STEAM project incorporating 3D design, modeling, engineering and scientific process. The students are challenged to design a bridge using Sketchup, print it on the 3D printer, weigh it, then we will test it to see how much weight it can hold.

We put together the Google Doc for the project (you can find it here) and built several bridges for testing. We decided that the students needed something to start with so we made the basic "road" that they are to build the bridge on and included all needed information in the Google Doc. Dr. Greenwood 3D printed his bridge and we weighed and testing its strength. This was done at an assembly where we projected the test onto the screen so that the students could see it. The students loved the destructive test! We found that the bridge could support 43 pounds. The challenge is open to the entire school with no deadline. There will be a reigning champion posted and as soon as someone creates a stronger bridge that person will be the champion.

This challenge has certainly sparked the interest of many of the students. I have had 5th graders in the lab working on Sketchup during their lung recess every day for the last week. One of the difficulties is that the students don't really know sketchup that well yet and building and printing a bridge requires slightly more familiarity with Sketchup.

The first students came to me excitedly proclaiming that they "for sure" had the best bridge and asked whether I could print it right away! We pulled up their design and found that they had lines representing the wires (like the Golden Gate Bridge) and a plane above to hold the wires. It lead to the dimension discussion and I explained that it would not print. They were not happy with this discovery but I encouraged them not to give up. Further I showed them a few basic principles with Sketchup and directed them to the videos to learn. They keep coming back and working on their bridge and are getting closer to something build-able. I am hoping that Sketchup does not become too much of a constraint and am looking for some alternatives.

In the meantime - the kids are excited and so am I.