2nd place in the Science and Engineering Challenge

For the past eight years, King's School in Gloucester has held a Science and Engineering Challenge for primary schools in Gloucestershire. This year there were 18 teams that entered and the Highnam team comprised of Amy, Molly, William and Scott.

The Challenge

The task was to design and build a weight bearing tower - there were points awarded for the height of the structure and the size of the weight bearing load.

Materials

On our tables we had our instruction sheet, a square wooden base for the tower and a box of materials. In the box we found: spagetti, marshmallows, art straws, blue tack and pipe cleaners. 

Building it

This was a very tricky task. Once we thought about our design we got to work on tower. We remembered it was important to include lots of triangles in the tower to make it as strong as possible. There were a couple of opportunities to have a test to see how much weight the tower would hold. Our first test held 450g and on the second we managed to strengthen the tower to hold 500g.

The results

The judges took into consideration our team work, our structural design, the size of the tower and the weight it was able to hold. Our model was quite tall and held quite a good weight so we thought we'd done pretty well. We were commended for our teamwork and came second overall. Well done to Field Court Juniors who won the competition. 

The parents and teachers

There was a table set up for parents and teachers to have a go at the challenge. They worked extremely hard and built a good tower with the help of Ryan and a few other parents from different schools.

Thank you to Miss Thomas for organising our team and to Mr Tibbles and Mr Dean for supporting us on the day.