After completing our home learning tasks this morning the children in school were set a challenge… Who can make the strongest structure?

We started the challenge with 5 minutes of ‘exploring’ for the children to play around with their mini marshmallows and sticks trying to join them together and make different shapes. During this time they came up with some questions that they would like answered.

Some of these questions we then looked at together, for example ‘What shape does the base need to be?’ ‘How do I stop it from falling over?’. We talked about different 3d shapes that we knew and came to the conclusion that the base would need to be a cube. Once we had successfully constructed our bases we  tried  to add anther level to our towers but we soon realised that the cube wasn’t steady enough as they were all starting to fall over! What could be do to make this stronger?  Do we need to take sticks away or add more? We talked about words such as ‘sturdy’ and ‘reinforce’.

Some of us then tried ‘doubling up’ the sticks, but this became too heavy as the structure got bigger and bigger. What else could we do? We explored lots of different ways between us.

The must successful way that we found was following a ‘pyramid’ structure. Evie managed to make her tower 3 stories high without it falling over!!

A huge well done to everyone today – this task required us to be very resilient!

Why don’t you try this at home…. can you make your structure stronger than ours?