Building bridges

In this lesson students are given 3 materials  paper, tape and scissors and they are asked to build a bridge that spans a paper river and must support  weight  measured in pennies. The students are not given any other instruction this is an open inquiry type model of learning. It helps students to think critically and be problem solvers. I ask the students to test the bridge to failure . Our strongest bridge held 209 pennies. We used this classroom activity to help the students gain engineering skills for their at home museum projects. Take a look.