Build Week 12: Bridges and Failure Modeling

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:

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….

build weekLisa ZapalacOctober 31, 2021Long-View Micro Schoolengineering challenge, models, failure modeling, bridges

Watch Your (Mathematics) Language!

If you step into a Long-View mathematics class, you’re apt to hear students reading mathematics expressions using language that seems a little different.

In reading an addition expression such as 41 + 17, for example, you’d hear a Long-View student say “forty-one and seventeen” rather than “forty-one plus seventeen.” While this may seem like a subtle substitution, there is a great deal of deliberate thought underneath this use of language that supports our young mathematicians as they develop strong conceptual understandings that will transfer across all of arithmetic to Algebra. Language is actually one of the most under-utilized models in school mathematics. Not at Long-View....

mathLisa ZapalacJanuary 25, 2017Long-View Micro Schoollanguage, math, models, manipulatives, addition, integers