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Katherine
Hi, my
name is Katherine and I am 8 years old. I am going to show you how
my elementary school team and I
built a 150 gram balsa wood bridge that held 300 pounds.
Click
here
for a 70 second
video preview of the SistersOn Bridges Site! The
video file is 3 megabytes.
This
bridge is special because we entered it the Destination Imagination
International Bridge Building Competition held in Knoxville
Tennessee in May 2005
and it won 3rd place! The contest was very large. It had
three stages of competition over several months and involved
hundreds of teams from the US, Canada, Guatemala and Korea.
Sabrina
I’m
Sabrina. I’m 13 and I'm going to teach anyone (at least anyone
who knows algebra and trig) the physics behind the bridge. The
goal of this section is to develop some engineering "rules of thumb"
that will help you make better bridges.
Why we
created this site and video
When
Katherine's team built their bridge, there was no one source that
explained what they needed to know.
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Several
sites explained how bridges worked, but none explained the
tradeoffs
between different bridge types.
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Some
sites explained how tools work, but none described all the
tools necessary to
built a balsa wood bridge.
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Some
sites discussed elements of bridge building, but none described the
process you need to follow in order to build the best bridge you
could.
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Some
described the physics behind bridges but none related it to
balsa wood bridges.
So we
created a video and this site to show
these and other things that were learned.
Please
let us know how you like them!
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