“London Bridge is falling down”, but not in Istanbul!

Today, we learned about the 8 steps in the Engineering and Design process. We started with identifying a problem that needed a solution and we got to test out models that could address the problem.

Turkey is the only country to span two continents and in it’s largest city, Istanbul, there is a channel of water (the Borphorus strait) that separates the European side and the Asian side and there are millions of people that commute to and from work. Our problem was: how would we get one million people across the Bosphorus strait in several times a day? We also had to consider constraints like the weight of trains, bikes and people, the weather, and marine life. It was very challenging, but we used the steps of the Engineering and Design process to guide us and it helped us to work as a team.

Some of us built tunnels and others built bridges using materials like straws, spaghetti, PlayDoh, tin foil, string, and even toilet paper rolls! We even had a few groups build cable cars! We got to be really creative with our designs, which was super fun! At the end, we tested the total load our prototypes can carry. The total load represented the total amount of commuters, with their method of transport, that  were able to successfully cross the strait. Some prototypes were more successful than others! What made the designs successful?? If you could redesign, what would you do differently?

 

Here is an awesome video of a possible solution designed by CAD software (we’ll discuss CAD software next week!), problem solving a similar situation, but in the mountainous region of Grenoble: http://www.3ds.com/fileadmin/VIDEOS/DesignStudio_MODULAIR_IDEA2014_web.mp4

 

 

AND IF YOU DID NOT GET ENOUGH OF ENGINEERING! There is an activity attached to this blog entry you can do at home and build your own solar oven!

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