Y8’s Towering Work in DT

Y8 boys commenced an exciting, new DT project this week – Structures. Over the coming weeks, the project will test the boys’ observation, problem-solving and teamwork skills and call on them to be curious as they investigate different properties of structures and the different shapes and materials used.

The first exercise of the project put all these skills into action as the boys became engineers for the session, striving to build tall, strong towers using just spaghetti and marshmallows.

As the boys experimented with their designs, they saw first-hand the factors that contribute to stability, notably that triangles are strong, and discovered that whilst a single strand of spaghetti may be weak, if you use lots of pieces, the strength increases, allowing for more robust and taller towers. They also gained an understanding of how the laws of physics impact structures, discovering it is best to have a tower that doesn’t lean too much and gained an appreciation of the importance of testing.