This building challenge provides an opportunity for students to explore concepts related to sturdy design, including load distribution, rigidity, balance, and strength.
The challenge
How would you design and construct a tower with LEGO® bricks to support the weight of a stack of books?
Possible learning sequence
- Discuss sturdiness with the students and explore some of the reasons why certain structures are sturdier than others. Show some examples of sturdy design and not-so-sturdy design (such as soft story failure).
- Discuss and agree on the criteria for the challenge. For example:
- Each tower should be at least some minimum height (e.g. 6 inches or 150mm)
- The tower should be sturdy enough to support an agreed weight, such as some number of textbooks.
- You will work in pairs and have 10 minutes to build your tower.
- The contruction must only use LEGO beams, plates, axles, and connectors.
- Stacking bricks is not allowed.
- Encourage the students to test their structures and redesign as they work.
- Once the time for building has elapsed, gather the students for the final strength test. Have the student pairs come up one at a time to test their designs. Have them record the results.
- Spend five minutes at the end of the lesson discussing the towers that the students built. Have them assess which techniques worked and which did not work.
- Point out the advantages of interweaving and crossing pieces, adding connector pegs and axles for support, and making supports wider for greater balance and strength.
Ideas for extension
- Investigate types of trusses. eg. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truss
- How might you connect different parts of the tower in such a way that the load on the tower is distributed as evenly as possible?
- Create the lightest tower that supports a specified weight a given height off the ground.
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