Bridge Building

The lessons behind bridge building are all about stresses

and compression and tension forces. Compression involves
pushing in towards the center while tension involves pulling
outward. Something that is compressed gets fatter in the middle,
while something that is under tension gets thinner.

Bending a straw (or a steel beam on a real bridge) is relatively

easy. To demonstrate this, support both ends of a straw (not
including the bendy part) and press in the middle. It bends very
easily.

Now try taking a straw and pressing in

the ends (this is compression stress).
One has to push a lot harder to get it to
bend. Now grab the end of the straw
and try pulling it apart (this is tensile
stress). It is essentially impossible.
When building a bridge, think about
where the weight is going to be, and try to support it so that
something will have to be compressed or extended for you bridge
to break. In this way the bridge will be much stronger.
 The Bridge Architect
One day, you receive a small letter from Tableton, a tiny town
of elves.

Dear Humans,
Hello. I am Tablo Mesas, the Mayer of Tableton. Three days
ago, a terrible storm blew down the bridge that connected our
town to Deskonia, a city across Noynac Canyon. This was the
twenty third time the bridge fell down, and I am very fed up with
the architect’s job. I need a brilliant engineer who can replace
our hopeless architect, and build a strong bridge that can stand
the fiercest storm.
Sincerely,
Tablo Mesas

It seems like the people of Tableton desperately need your

help. Inside the envelope, you find instructions on what the bridge
should be like.

I am sorry to inform you but we can only provide you with

twenty twigs and five feet of string…most of our supplies were
blown away by the storm. Below is my drawing of Noynac
Canyon.

The bridge spanning this canyon should be at least 2 inches tall.

It can be as wide as you want.
 So now you know your task. But before building a bridge for real,
you are going to build a model of the bridge using 20 straws and 5
feet of masking tape. To test to see if it is strong enough, you will
see how much water the bridge can hang in a bucket. The bucket
will be hung with a string from the weight holder like this:

CD

Pencil

This means that there has to be a place that can hold the weight
holder in the center of the bridge, and the bridge also has to have a
hole or slit beneath the weight holder so that the string can pass
through.

After building, you will test your bridge between two desks placed 8
inches apart.
You look inside the envelope again and you find pictures of bridges
that fell in the past:

Think about why these bridges fell.