Da Vinci Bridges

For Science Week 2020, pupils from Year 5 and 6 explored Da Vinci Bridges. These ingenious bridges are self supporting, requiring no fixings of any kind. Leonardo Da Vinci's original bridge was designed to be used by soldiers, who would each carry one part of the bridge, assembling it when necessary.  The children first learned how to assemble model bridges, before designing their own versions in Tinkercad. Children were left to decide the lengths of each bridge beam, so consequently their bridges all had different heights and spans. 
A small group of of children then made a scale version of our proposed full-sized bridge, which was designed to span a trench that had mysteriously appeared in the school field!
After experimenting with different notch depths, children began preparing the beams of the full size version (with a little help from Mr North!). 
The finished bridge was surprisingly long and worked well, though we decided that using shorter beams would result in a slightly taller and stronger bridge. All in all the project was a great success!