The Year 7s at Bede's Prep School visited to complete a day of science and mathematics at the Senior School, aided by some of our most capable Lower Fifth pupils, who mentored them excellently.  

The day began with a “prisoner’s dilemma” style game to test the bounds of trust and collaboration.  

The pupils then had time to plan and design life-size structures for their bridges, briefed to build a bridge to withstand the maximum weight across the centre and covering a 30cm gap.  

They also experienced some workshops designed by our staff, ranging from a tricky centre-of-mass experiment to puzzles (2D and 3D) and probability.  

Finally, it was time to test out the bridge designs to the point of destruction.  Each team had assembled a functional bridge of sufficient length to cover the gap, but only one would be the strongest.  

All entries were impressive, given that the spaghetti (and glue), which were the only allowed resources, were in themselves not strong enough to hold a hundred grams.  

The sturdiest bridges kicked in at around 1kg of weight being successfully held, with the Bridge of Despair at 0.9kg, and The Trust Bridge at 1.3kg.  An honourable mention goes to the mighty I Don’t Mind team, whose bridge withstood a mass of 1.8kg, but the absolute strongest was team Le Bron’s bridge, weighing in at a whopping 2.7kg before reaching breaking point.  Congratulations to all who took part, but in particular to Dylan, Lily, Amelia, Oliver and Charles of the winning team.  

Huge thanks goes to our Lower Fifth pupils who stepped up to assist, the teachers from both schools, Holroyd Howe and our Marketing department for catering, and of course all involved parents and pupils.  And to every teacher who lent us a classroom to coat in a thin layer of spaghetti and glue for the day.