August 4, 2005

Today, the students began by going outside to do an experiment, testing the strength of materials. They used four different foam beams with the same area but different dimensions and balanced each one between two concrete blocks. Dr. Love then placed the maximum amount of weight on each beam. This taught them that even if something has the same amount of material, the way the structure is built affects its strength.

When they came back into the classroom, the students created similar structures of the beams on the computers. Then they found the MOI (moment of inertia) for each of the beams on the computer. After this, they created a graph, MOI vs. weight, and found ways in which they could predict information.

With this newfound knowledge, they challenged their minds by being put to the test. They were to design a structure on the computer and were told to make a prediction of how much weight the structure would hold in real life. They built their structures and tested them to see how close they were to there predictions.