Posted in Science and other Hands On activities
We are currently using the book Towers and Tunnels by Etta Kaner and it is full of fun experiments to test your knowledge of building towers and tunnels and it also encourages us to notebook while we experiment. Last night K started on one of the projects which required us to construct I beams. He did most of the cutting and folding before he went to bed and this morning he set to gluing them all together : )
The first thing it asked us to test was the strength of two I beams, one consisting of the two pieces of construction paper glued together and the other with an additional piece (the blue strip of paper) glued on both sides of the beam over top of the seam between the two pieces of construction paper. We placed one of our light books on top of them and as you can see the I beam on the left without the additional strip of blue paper started to buckle first at the bottom. The unique shape of an I beam spreads a majority of the material away from the center line thus strengthening the overall structure. The additional paper glued to the sides makes it even stronger : )
Now comes the fun part of building your own skyscraper! For this one K built himself a nice foundation and then we decided to test it's strength. So we piled on (skinny) book after book until it finally collapsed *grin* We weighed the books when we were done and those 4 paper I beams were able to hold 1lb 7oz.'s worth of weight before the base started to sway and fell over. I think that it would have been able to hold much more since the beams didn't actually buckle under the weight. We must have been lopsided somehow : )
We decided to test our luck with another structure and this time we just set up 4 I beams at a time then a book and so on repeating until we had 3 stories. This worked much better and we were able to distribute the same 1lb 7oz on top of the base but then we ran out of I beams :( Oh well maybe K will feel up to making more tomorrow and we can try and beat our 3 story record *grin*
Blessings,
BChsMamaof3
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