Jazmín M.

Hey Guys!

I am going to talk to you about my last module I did I did these last six weeks in PLTW. What is PLTW? PLTW is one of the many fun classes they provide for us here at the Ann Richards School. PLTW stand for Project Lead The Way. The class is supposed to help us choose what path way we would like to take next year in High School. There are three path ways and those are Engineering, Bio-Med, and Media Tech.

This last module I finished was a module based on Engineering. In this module my group (Lucero and Jennifer) and I had to design and build a bridge. The bridge we had to build had certain requirements and those were:

• Span: 16” between bearing points (should be longer than 16″)
• Bearing: maximum of 1”
• Height: 4” max.
• Width: 4” max.
• Weight: 40 grams max.

The materials we had to use to build this bridge were round toothpicks (2 ½” x 1/16”diameter), cotton thread, and glue. My first thought was “How in the world am I going to build a STRONG bridge with only those materials?!?” But me and my group worked together to design a bridge that we thought would work best. We decided to make our bridge out of triangles, since triangles are stronger that squares. So the first day of building we spend the whole class period making triangles with the thickness of three tooth picks (so each triangle had 9 tooth picks). This was a really hard process because at first we didn’t know how to tie the triangles properly so that they are strong. The good thing is that we had glue. So we tied the triangle and then put a little glue to secure it even more. Then when the triangles were done we connected them with more tooth picks at the top, and there was our bridge! The bridge ended up weighing 31 grams and it hold 400 grams. I think we could have done better.

Overall I really enjoyed this module I learned a lot about engineering and I had a lot of fun building and designing this bridge.
Thanks for Reading!