Pasta Bridge Engineering Challenge
Materials you’ll need
- different kinds of dry pasta
- hot glue
- jar
- twine
- marbles
- carabiner
The rules
- You can use only pasta and hot glue to build your bridge.
- There are no other rules!
Learn more
Our bridge design uses a bunch of small triangles. That’s because a square shape will snap quickly when squeezed, but a triangle can take a lot more pressure before it snaps. That’s why you’ll see real bridges built with triangles like ours, to help stand up under the pressure of cars pushing down on them.This challenge is actually a small-scale version of the kinds of models that professional engineers use to test their designs! (Although we assume that civil engineers generally use less pasta than we did.) If you watch the video closely, you’ll notice that we didn’t just hang the marble jars in the middle. Instead, we attached 3 loops of twine at 3 different points on the bridge. That trick helped to spread out the force applied to the bridge so that we could load it up with more marbles. (In fact, it worked a little too well — that’s why we had to use the engineering book at the end to get it to break!)
So if you try this at home, don’t forget to use our 3-point twine trick to let you drop in maximum marbles!