Kier Design

Hi, I'm Katie and I'm a civil engineer. I'm going to show you an activity today that you can do at home with your children. It's a really good introduction to civil engineering and it's called Spaghetti Challenge. It's aimed at children from about six years and up. You're going to need some spaghetti and you're going to need some mini marshmallows. If you haven't got mini marshmallows then BlueTac also works really well. The aim of this challenge is to build a structure out of spaghetti as tall as you possibly can. So the first stage in any engineering project is design. We never build anything without designing something. So hopefully your child's got lots of good ideas about how they're going to build a structure and how they're going to make it really tall. It's important to ask your child why they think what they're designing is going to make their structure tall. If they're struggling a little bit for ideas, a really good example of a structure in this instance is the Eiffel Tower. I have to want a really simple picture of it here but you can get images online. One thing to note with the Eiffel Tower, it's nice and symmetrical. If it looks more It's also good to note that the base is larger than the top and that's really good in terms of stability. Then have a look a bit closer at the Eiffel Tower and you'll see it's got lots of smaller members that go together to make a nice tall structure and that some of these members are diagonal as well which embraces to keep it nice and stable. You can also see from your spaghetti that the taller it is, the more unstable it's going to become. So they might want to think about snapping and breaking the spaghetti down into smaller members. So once they're happy, they've got something designed and they know what they're going to build, they can start building. It's quite fiddly at first trying to work out how much pressure is needed to get the spaghetti into the marshmallows. The spaghetti also does snap at times. So smaller children are probably going to need a little bit of a hand just putting the structure together. Once you've got the base, it's a really good idea as well to set a tape it down, keep it nice and stable for them, it makes it a bit easier. And then they can start building. Once they've built their structure, it's a really good opportunity to have a look at what they've designed and what they've built and is it the same. If it's not the same and it's changed, why did it change? If the structure collapsed at any time, it's a good time to speak to them about why the structure collapsed. Did it start to become less symmetrical and topple over? Did it collapse at the bottom because it couldn't withstand the weight of the tower? And where did it collapse? It's probably If the structure didn't collapse and your child decided that they wanted to stop, they thought that if they carried on, the structure might collapse at some point. It's a good idea to speak to them about what made them think that they couldn't make their structure any taller. Hopefully you have lots of fun building your spaghetti structures and look forward to seeing how tall you can make them. If you'd org. uk and check out our STEM at home section.