Structural Engineering

Students in the Tech Lab start simple with competitions using paper, straws, spaghetti, and other easily obtained materials to produce structures that must stretch, hold weight, span a distance and cantilever. Structural engineering is taught with these simple activities that promote cooperative learning and critical thinking.

Students use a machine called the Interactive Strength Challenger™ to test designs for sandwich panels, trusses, cylinders, bridges, and any other thing they care to test! It provides them tension and compression forces up to 1000 lbs. A full scale plotter then graphs and documents the results of each test. Coming in the future to this page are Quicktime™ movies of the crushing of some bridges!

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Students also use a program called Bridge Builder™ to design bridges and test them on the computer. We are able to create VRML files of our bridges (Virtual Reality, so a person could do a fly through of the bridge)