Second grade students learned that civil engineers design and construct roads, bridges, canals, dams, airports, sewage systems, pipelines, structural components of buildings, and railways.

I explained that they were going to use the Engineer Design Process to construct a bridge with just two pieces of copy paper! The bridge must hold a car and a boat should be able to pass under it. No tape was permitted. They failed and then improved their designs multiple times. Just about everyone tried a beam bridge first. Then, I brought these engineers back together and after looking at arch and truss designs, I then sent them back to work. Folding the paper (like a fan) to construct triangles (truss) proved to be the most effective way to successfully complete this task.

Click here to learn more about bridges.

Planning:

Creating:

Testing:

We noticed that cardboard is supported with triangles too.