Engineers Week took place this year from 4th to the 10th of March 2017. On Thursday Mr. Murphy spoke with the senior room and explained to us about all the different types of engineering. Pupils learned that civil engineering includes design and construction of buildings, roads, bridges and dams.
Today our focus was on bridges, we spoke about
What is a bridge?
Where would you find bridges?
What are bridges made of?
Factors that affect the design of bridges
We listed some bridges we use everyday near our school and we also discussed different types of bridges.
- Beam and slab bridge
- Truss bridge
- Arch bridge
- Suspension bridge
- Cable stayed bridge
Mr Murphy got the children to experiment with their own bridges to see how shapes affects the strength of a bridge (Paper bridge experiment)
We used A4 paper, building blocks and coins.
- We made a bridge from one piece of paper and tested its strength by adding coins until the bridge collapsed.
- Then we used two pieces of paper and tested it again.
- We then used one piece of paper and folded the sides i.e a walled bridge and tested how many coins it would take for this bridge to collapse.
- We made an arch bridge using two pieces of paper
- The final bridge we tested was a truss bridge
We found from our experiment that the truss bridge i.e triangular shape was the strongest. We all had great fun experimenting, designing and predicting today in class