Year 6 Science Day

12th February 2020

We began our Science Investigation Day with an exciting starter challenge that involved spaghetti sticks and marshmallows! The challenge was to build the highest tower that would stand up for 10 seconds or more!

Here were the various heights: 55cm, 50cm. 47cm, 38cm and 27cm. Can you guess the height of the towers below?

 

Our enquiry question was:

How does the design of the bridge affect the amount of weight that it can support?

Some of our predictions:

  •  I think that the bridge will collapse if we just use paper!
  •  I think the bridge will fall over because you need stronger      material than paper!
  •  I think if we make the paper strong enough (for example roll it in tubes) it may be strong enough!

 

Method:

The materials that we used to construct our bridge:

Paper, scissors, cellotape.

Then we rolled the paper to make paper tubes for the base

We thought about how we could make it stronger by adding in triangular shaped tubes

We added paper inside the hollow tubes to strengthen them further.

 

Results:

We tested each of our bridges in turn using 100g weights which we placed carefully onto the bridge.

The heaviest weight two of the bridges constructed could support was 1500g!  The lightest weight was 100g and then the bridge   started to topple over or bend with the weight!

Evaluation:

Most of us agreed that you needed a solid foundation for the bridge to be able to hold a heavy weight!  Having an atheistic looking bridge was not going to help with its strength! However, we had lots of fun making and testing out our bridges!