Physics: Newspaper Skyscraper

Every building enterprise requires the architect to overcome the forces of gravity and wind to literally rise to the challenge of building something both tall and stable. In our case, the kids were challenged to build skyscrapers out of newspaper and tape. Through trial and error the kids figured out different effective building techniques (e.g. folding the paper into various shapes and building a wider/heavier base).

Afterward we evaluated each tower by measuring its weight, height, and stability in the face of a powerful blow dryer. One of the interesting things we noticed was that different designs privilege one characteristic at the expense of another, meaning it's really hard to build a tower that is both stable and tall.

Physics: Bridge Basics

This week the kids built bridges out of index cards. They could bend or cut the cards anyway they liked, but the bridges had to span 10 cm, with no more than 1 cm at either end resting on the supporting books (once again an incomplete set of 1985 Encyclopedia Britannica comes in handy).

We tested the bridges to see which ones could support the most weight. The simplest flat bridges could hold around 30 g, while bending the card into a fan-like structure could support more than a half a kilo. Pretty cool!

We concluded by discussing how bridges and other structures often feature triangles because of their ability to transmit forces of tension and compression.