Last week third grade began a unit about engineering in science class. After a visit from Habitat for Humanity, we began discussing what engineering is. We arrived at the conclusion that engineers create things to help fix problems. After discussing a few current events from which problems have arisen, the students thought of some ways engineers could create things to help with the problems. They went a step farther and used their imagination to derive imaginary inventions to help with more common problems such as making their beds, rolling sushi during sushi shortages, and helping to extinguish wild fires.
After drawing and presenting their inventions with one another, we began learning about bridges. We discussed terms such as load bearing and structural soundness. After the students practiced creating virtual bridges and testing to make sure they were load bearing and sound on the computers they began a bridge building challenge. Each group had one class period to create a bridge from straws and tape. We had fun testing the bridges to find out how much load each bridge could hold.
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