Mind Games

It’s time for another Think! Challenge. You can check out the solution post for other creative ideas.

This week, our instructions were to:

Put the following out on a table: 2 cups, 2 spoons (plastic or real), 6 sticks of spaghetti, 15 inches of tape, two 8.5 x 11 sheets of paper, a measuring tape and lots of quarters or pennies (the measuring tape and quarters/pennies cannot be used in the solution). Using the cups as the ends, tell your students to build a bridge that spans 9 inches and will hold as much weight as possible. When the bridge is complete, measure its strength by placing quarters/pennies on it (or anything else you want). Count how many quarters the bridge holds.

JediBoy was excited to build a bridge. First, he carefully lined up the six pieces of spaghetti between the two cups, and they held about 6 quarters before rolling off the cups.

Then he decided to tape the spaghetti ends to the cups and also to add a strip of paper over the top. This bridge held 11 quarters, but JediBoy noticed that the spaghetti was slipping out.

He asked me for some suggestions, and I helped him think about the fact that one full sheet of paper folded over would be stronger than a single strip of paper. We worked together to fold a sheet of paper into a thicker strip and tape it shut. He decided to use just the folded paper as a bridge, and got to 12 or 13 quarters before the collapse!

JediBoy decided to use the spaghetti and the folded paper, and this bridge held 37 quarters!

He was pretty proud, as you can see!

Later, we worked together to build a bridge that used two sheets of paper, folded, with spaghetti taped inside to provide strength, and together we piled 100 quarters on that bridge. But when I was talking to JediBoy about the project, he was proudest of his 37-quarter bridge that he built independently.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 7th, 2008 at 12:33 pm and is filed under arts, crafts & activities, pictures, think challenge, websites, you could call this "school". You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.