Hello and welcome to my portfolio post! I am NM, a junior Global Citizenship Experience lab school student. I am taking a class called “Urban Planning”, and we have been learning about the history of Chicago architecture, what urban planning entails, the different types of bridges in the world, and why they work or don't work for certain situations and conditions. We also walked around downtown with Mark Bennett who works on urban planning with Divvy, and we talked about and observed the different bridges and urban planning that can be viewed around downtown Chicago. In this unit, I am most proud of my interest in the history of Chicago’s architecture, I found the book “A Devil in the White City” fascinating. For this Action Project, we were meant to build our own bridges from popsicle sticks, using our knowledge learned in this class about the different ways to make bridges, what methods work best for which situations, etc. We were also told to use only 75 popsicle sticks, to make sure our bridge could hold at least 10 pounds, for it to be a truss bridge, and for our bridge to be long enough to be tested over an 18-inch gap.
This is the popsicle stick bridge that my partner and I made:
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"Top of Bridge", LS, 2023 |
------- | "Side of Bridge", LS, 2023
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"Center view of Bridge", LS, 2023
My partner and I wanted to make a strong bridge, and we knew that triangles are the strongest shape, so we thought it was a good idea to make a bridge with lots of triangles. The bridge design that caught our attention first was the Double Intersection Pratt. We were also interested in the Baltimore Bridge, although I seemed to favor the Baltimore Bridge while my partner preferred the Double Intersection Pratt. Those designs however would require a lot of popsicle sticks, more than what we were allowed to use. So we researched and learned that the simple Pratt and Howe bridges were very strong and nice looking, so we decided to make our bridge based on those instead.
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| History_wing, 2023 |
The curriculum of this school's curriculum is based around the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG's), and the SDG that this project revolves around is SDG #11. This is to “make cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient, and sustainable.” This goal has a lot to do with urban planning, which is exactly what this class, (Urban Planning), is all about. To make bridges we need to take into consideration what needs to be transported, how strong it needs to be, what weather conditions it needs to withhold, how long it needs to be, etc. The most important thing about designing bridges is people's safety. This is why our bridge is specifically connected to target 11.2. “By 2030, provide access to safe, affordable, accessible and sustainable transport systems for all, improving road safety, notably by expanding public transport, with special attention to the needs of those in vulnerable situations, women, children, persons with disabilities and older persons”. Our focus was for our bridge to be strong and sturdy so that it would not collapse. On the right, there are sketches I made of the design that we ended up going with, it includes a labeled sketch of the parts of the bridge and marks the different tension and compression points of our bridge.
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| "Bridge sketches", NM, 2023 |
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| "Digital Sketch", LS, 2023 |
These are the Bridge’s Measurements:- Length: 21.5 inches
- Height: 4.5 inches
- Width: 4.5
- Amount of Sticks: 75
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| "Calculations" LS, NM, 2023 |
We’ve been doing a lot of trigonometry work recently, and everything about triangles. We used right triangles and equilateral triangles in our bridge, and many calculations to determine something potential energy, kinetic energy, and more. These are the calculations we did for our bridge.
We ended up using exactly 75 popsicle sticks. It took us a little bit to agree on a bridge design, but once we did we got straight to work on building our bridge. It went pretty smoothly, our biggest challenge was actually gluing the two bridge frames together because we had to prop it up so that it would not fall or tip over. We also realized that we made our bridge only barely more than 18 inches, which would make it more difficult to test and tell sturdy, so we created sturdy extensions on each side of the bridge. We used small amounts of glue to hold our bridge together, and without intending to, our bridge ended up being lighter than most of our classmate's bridges!
This was a very fun project to do, I loved testing our bridges, our's held 15 pounds! There were some challenges as I mentioned before, but overall it was a very fun project and I am proud of our Bubba Bridge! I hope you liked it too and thank you for reading my portfolio post!
Citations:
“Bridge Basics - a Spotter’s Guide to Bridge Design.” Pghbridges.com, 2023, pghbridges.com/basics.htm. Accessed 26 Apr. 2023.
“Tension & Compression Forces.” Conceptual Physics: Bridges, 2023, conceptualphysicsbridges.weebly.com/tension--compression-forces.html. Accessed 26 Apr. 2023.
“What’s in a Truss?” Wright-Brothers.org, 2023, www.wright-brothers.org/History_Wing/Wright_Story/Inventing_the_Airplane/Eyes_on_Skies/Truss_Sidebar.htm. Accessed 26 Apr. 2023.
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