Bede's
Year 7 Engineering Day: Towers and Tumbles
Matthew Peattie, Teacher of Maths at Bede's Senior School

Friday 11 June saw our Year 7 pupils visit our Senior School in Upper Dicker for an engineering challenge. We had limited time, and armed only with spaghetti and marshmallows, each pupil pair was given a brief to construct as mighty a tower as possible.

Our intrepid Prep Schoolers mind-mapped some ideas about design, and the different elements we needed to consider, in the form of a quiz and many discussions with both staff and our volunteer Sixth Form mathematicians, who were of enormous help during the event. We discussed shapes with strong joints, weight distribution, and ideas that needed balancing out such as strength vs mass. 

The main construction event was not without its challenges, and as we stopped for a break, several towers had collapsed and ideas needed taking back to the drawing board.  At this point, pupils volunteered reasons as to why their towers had collapsed and resolved on better ideas and strategy for a second attempt. Here, they learned the important lesson that it is fine to make mistakes but that we can learn from them and make improvements. In fact, at least one group that finished in the top three had made a complete restart, and many made stronger and taller constructions the second time around. 

My hope is that these pupils learned something about teamwork, and managed to see the value of their partners’ ideas as well as valuing the advice of their older peers in the form of our Sixth Form helpers. Although my own experiments indicated a hexagonal design was a good idea, there was a good variety of winning strategies and a plethora of individual designs. 

Feedback from the pupils indicated they had a lot of fun (although less so if they suffered a last-minute tower collapse) and the final scores saw team 'Zaxeolotls' (Zak and Zac) coming first, at an impressive 116cm, with team 'ESHA' (Mesha and Emma) coming a close second, and team 'The Leaning Eiffel Tower' (my favourite team-name from the winners, consisting of Hattie and Bea), coming third. Congratulations to all our winners! 

Naturally the prizes were a tower… to construct: miniature metal Eiffel Tower ornaments that might remind them of their triumphs!  Huge thanks goes to all the staff and Sixth Form volunteers who made this possible, including Holroyd Howe for catering, Senior and Prep School event staff, and our cleaning team, as well as the Year 7s whose resilience and creativity made it worthwhile. 

Learn more about Year 7 at Bede's Prep

Visit Bede's Senior School

Visit Bede's Prep School and Nursery

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