This week, in Design Technology, we have been learning about bridges. We started with a fun warm up challenge where we had to work in pairs to bridge a gap using only a single sheet of paper! This was harder than it looked and the ‘bridge’ had to support a cube made of eight blocks.
Next, we learnt that there are six different types of bridge and that the ‘Beam Bridge’ is the simplest and probably the oldest type. We learnt the names and the purpose of the different parts of a beam bridge.
Our D.T. task was to design and make a safe, sturdy beam bridge that had to be at least 20 cm long and had to bridge a gap of at least 15cm. It needed to include a beam, a parapet, abutments and we could add piers if necessary. We were given a very small selection of materials to use and we were banned from using sticky tape to make the task even more challenging!
We decided as a class that we would test how strong the bridge was by counting how many toy cars it could safely support. We designed and labelled our bridges using the correct terminology and chose the resources we would use for each part. We wrote a success criteria to make sure that our bridge design would fulfil the brief that we had been given.
Next, it was time to build and test our bridges which was definitely the most exciting part!
Finally, we evaluated our finished bridges to decide if we had met the success criteria, to write about any challenges that we had faced or changes that we had made and to identify what we would do differently next time.
Mine was the bridge with the MOST cars!
Yes, Alfred, yours was the bridge with the most cars 🚘 🚙 however others were more stable. It was soo much fun 🤩 to design and then build a bridge 🌉 using all the right features that a normal beam bridge 🌁 should have. However it was challenging 😰 to only use limited materials ( glue, straws, scissors and paper ).
Love Tijne 💗 🌸