Engineering: Winter, Week 7

This time around, we spent most of our Engineering time focused on the popsicle stick tower project that we've worked on in previous weeks.. Before we started, we talked a bit about how, in building a tower, we're striving to construct something that's both tall and stable, and set a goal for ourselves by building a small tower out of a few wooden blocks, the height of which we would try to match with our popsicle stick structure. It was interesting to see how having a concrete, set goal really helped give the kids a little direction in their brainstorming. In the end, we ended up with a structure that was nearly as tall as the wooden blocks, but also suffered a small setback - one part of our tower was fairly lopsided, and we spent quite a bit of time and energy reinforcing that section. Of course, that was a wrinkle in our plan that was more than welcome, as it simply afforded us with an opportunity to talk out and test new solutions. Have a good weekend!