Being an engineer wan't quite so easy with today's challenge. The basic idea was that we all knew the story of the Three Little Pigs and how the house of straw and the house of sticks could not stand up to the Wolf as he huffed and puffed. Only the house of bricks stood up to the wolf.
Today each student again thought of how they could create a structure that could stand up to the wind (or in our case, a blow dryer). We looked at the various materials that would be available in the teacher's hardware store. The materials included drinking straws, craft sticks, pip cleaners, styrofoam bases, large index cards, string, coffee stir sticks, and lots and lots of masking tape.
The groups met and discussed their plans and decided what the structure would look like and what materials would be needed. In this case, they were to label their drawings with the material names.
They would come to the 'store' and order what they needed.
Together, they were to work to try and create the structure that would not fall down.
There were groups that were a bit more haphazard in the approach,
and there were groups that had a plan and worked well in attempting to make the structure.
Whether the structure withstood the blowdryer test or not,
the idea was that they would be able to talk about the plan, what worked well, what was difficult and what they would try differently next time. Being happy with the final structure was a bonus!
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