November 1, 2006
Engineering Al Dente
Patrick Gritt '08 and Chance Jennings '08 test their pasta bridge, the Sweetness, for their engineering class.
Students in the Introduction to Engineering class, a science elective offered this fall, spent time building spaghetti bridges as a part of a unit examining the strengths and weaknesses of various bridge structures. Using only spaghetti and epoxy (with a small piece of wood and metal from which to suspend weights), students had to construct a bridge that would span a one-meter width, be more than a half meter tall, and have a mass of no more than 0.75kg.
Production of the bridges took about two weeks, during which time the students experienced plenty of frustration as they worked to adapt their fragile materials to their construction needs. According to teacher Jamie Nichols, "It is not at all easy to build something strong and stable out of regular spaghetti."
After many hours and lots of glue, the bridges were put to the test on Grandparents' Day. Excited and nervous students, teachers, and grandparents watched as weight was added to each bridge to see how much it could endure. Most of the bridges could hold about 1kg of weight, but the winning bridge, aptly called The Sweetness and constructed by Patrick Gritt '08 and Chance Jennings '08, held a remarkable 15kg of weight before buckling.
"Even though the epoxy fumes gave me headaches and the bridge took a lot of time to construct," says Jennings, "we still had fun and learned a lot about bridges."