Wednesday 12th February
On Wednesday, P5/6 had a visit from Sentinus, to talk to us about STEM, and specifically, engineering and its importance in our world! We discussed how many different aspects of our lives have been shaped by engineers from all different backgrounds: chemical engineers, electrical engineers, mechanical engineers. Our topic for the day was Bridges and Towers. We were given two challenges and had to approach them with an engineer’s skill set and process: plan, design, build, improve.
Challenge 1: Build a tower (using 40 lengths of spaghetti and 18 marshmallows) that was tall and structurally sound. It had to be self-standing and able to take the weight of a roll of masking tape!
Challenge 2: Build a bridge (using paper) that had a span of at least 20cm and could hold as much weight as possible.
We enjoyed talking about the design process, but we realllly loved the building process! We worked hard to come up with ideas as a team, working well together. We also tried our best to incorporate the tips we learned from Sentinus: about how paper can be manipulated to hold the most weight, and the strength of triangular shapes.
Here we are displaying our bridges and explaining our designs to the rest of the class.
