Build Week 12: Bridges and Failure Modeling
Learning experiences at Long-View are immersive, rigorous, and collaborative, and Build Weeks are no exception. Build Weeks occur several times a year at Long-View and are a week of special programming where learners work collaboratively on a rich challenge that calls for higher levels of problem-solving and collaboration. The Long-View teachers work together to conceive of and plan for Build Weeks and endeavor to offer a challenge that will surface opportunities for the learners to acquire or practice myriad skills. Learners are often exposed to a wide range of new ideas and fields and have the opportunity to interact with experts from the wider community. Build Weeks challenge learners to employ higher levels of discourse and reasoning, make connections across disciplines, reflect and set goals, try out new things, and grow intellectually. In past Build Weeks, learners have built enrichment items for animals at the Austin Nature Center, built and captained cardboard boats that sailed across the lake, written a constitution for a fictional island, been immersed in improv, and built vertical gardens.
Though the challenges are often unique, it is not the content of the Build Week challenges that makes Build Week full of opportunity. Contrary to how you might see other schools engage in this kind of project week, Long-View teachers don’t overly control the process or the products. They do not work to be sure everything ends up perfect and all participants end up happy in the end. Instead, teachers focus on orchestrating rich learning experiences, and then they coach into those learning experiences. They sometimes choose to coach heavily and other times give minimal feedback and step out of the situation so that children can experience the successes and consequences as their own. Those choices by the Long-View teachers — to engage in “lean” coaching, to let kids authentically experience the highs and lows, and to refrain from overly controlling the products — engender some messy moments and it isn’t unheard of during a Build Week to witness some tears of frustration, tension among teammates, and hard work that doesn’t pay off in the end.
The beauty of Build Week, even amidst the frustrations and difficulties, is that Long-View teachers have the chance to work deeply with learners on collaboration, communication, critical thinking, and creativity. They have the chance to see the kids in a new light. They see leadership skills emerge, gain clarity regarding individual skills that need targeted support so that they can nurture needed growth, and see the learners awed by yet unknown talents of their peers.
Build Week 12 occurred last week and was a great example of the rich opportunities that lie within the challenge of a Build Week. The focus this time was on bridges and understanding the idea of “failure modeling.” The learners were placed in 3 person teams and given a Call to Action for a bridge prototype. Here’s one team’s Call to Action:
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DEVELOP, DESIGN, AND CONSTRUCT A PROTOTYPE FOR A LONG-SPAN BRIDGE
Introduction: Your team’s goal is to design a prototype for a long-span traffic bridge to cross a one-mile-wide strait connecting a bay to an ocean. Your team is in competition. On Thursday, October 28th, your prototype will be tested for its strength to weight ratio. During this time, your team will also have to defend your engineering and structural choices and account for any future changes that have become evidently necessary through the failure modeling Research and Design process. Your prototype should be designed to carry approximately 100,000 vehicles/day. Your team should aim to both design and build the lightest and strongest prototype.
Project Specifications:
The total length of your bridge will be 0.5 miles.
Your bridge must have a 220 foot clearance from the base to the deck to allow for ocean freighters to pass through.
Your bridge must have a deck width of 88 feet.
Your bridge can only be supported by two piers, one on either side of the straight. The length between the piers must be at least 0.33 miles.
The deck of your prototype should have a half-inch hole to accommodate the weight test.
Prototype Scale: 1:440
Recommendations for Project Considerations:
This prototype design must be both strong and lightweight, while still providing a long span.
Your team must consider how to minimize the cost of such a large bridge.
This type of bridge is susceptible to sway and ripple in the wind, how will you mitigate this in your design?
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To ready themselves for this work, teams spent time:
Reading and researching using a curated list of resources
Attending workshops on scale, materials science, strength to weight ratio, tensile and compressive forces, and failure modeling
Getting feedback from two experts — a civil engineering professor at The University of Texas and a planner with the Texas State Parks and Wildlife Department
Utilizing their mathematics skills to scale their model correctly
Designing, building, testing, and iterating prototypes
Learning how to use tools safely and effectively
Teams built truss bridges, arch bridges, cable-stayed and suspension bridges, and various hybrids in an effort to answer their Call to Action. In the final hour of the final day of Build Week, all teams participated in a competition in which they tested the strength-to-weight ratio of each final model. This meant that the culmination of the week’s work ended in bridges being broken, though this proved to require quite an effort in the cases of a handful of bridges. Our bridge models in the final competition weighed in at 3-30.6 ounces and tolerated between 7 lbs and 124.4 lbs before failing. The strength-to-weight ratio ranged from 3.33 to 276.44.
Find out more about Build Week 12 in our Instagram highlight here.
