Today p7r had a visit from Martin and Hazel who are civil engineers. They showed us some famous engineering landmarks in Scotland and around the world like the Falkirk wheel, the Eifel Tower and the Burj Khalifa in Dubai. They told us about how these structures were built and designed. It was interesting to hear that the site of the Forth bridges is the only place in the world where there is bridges from 3 different centuries next to each other.

Martin and Hazel speaking to p7r

Next, they set us on a design challenge in our groups. We were to build as tall a structure as possible using pieces of spaghetti and small marshmallows. The object was to work as a team and see how tall a structure we could build in a 20 minute period. The group with the tallest freestanding structure would win.
Here are some of the results:

The winning group was Lauren, Beth, Haris and James, their tower was 36cm tall.

This was a good opportunity for us to find out about engineering and what an engineer does, in May we will be working with the primary 7’s at Park and Sunnyside to design even bigger structures.