Booth Id:
ENMC028
Category:
Engineering Mechanics
Year:
2020
Finalist Names:
Despain, Bryce (School: Riverside High School)
Abstract:
When we were asked to come up with a science fair project, it wasn’t hard for me because I’ve always loved designing things. I chose to build different bridge types that were all the same length, out of building material called K’nex. The reason for this was because I wanted to see how much weight the bridges could hold depending on the shape, size, and design that they each had.
Now, I will say this, the only problem that I had while doing this science project was building the supports for each bridge type. The reason for this was because since the bridges did have different shapes and sizes, some of the K’nex wouldn’t line up the same as the other bridges did before, so I was forced to improvise. Although I did have to improvise with my science project, I made it as realistic as possible.
I built a total of three bridges and in this order, a straight bridge, elevated bridge, and curved bridge. The weights that I used were made by me, which were 40 ziplock bags filled with 200 grams of sand each. The first two bridges held the entire 40 bags of sand, however, the third bridge only held 6-7 bags of sand as I did three trials on each bridge type. In conclusion, I was really surprised by the data that I collected in the process of conducting my science experiment.