Bridge Expo and Testing Day

8^th grade students tested their bridges today, 5/29/13, after building the structures for six class periods. Twenty-six bridges were tested by adding weight to the span until it collapsed. The winner, yet to be determined, is the strongest bridge but didn’t cost too much money. We will be creating graphs, analyzing ratios of bridge cost to live load weight, and attempting to conclude which bridge was the winner of the competition. A special thanks to our guest experts, bridge engineers and architects from the Pittsburgh Region. Representatives from Michael Baker Corporation, HDR, Inc. and Penn Dot District 11 used their insight and expertise helped to enrich this learning activity.

Bridge designs can be seen on the classroom website. Also, messages about the test day have been posted to twitter under the #lab110 hash tag.