Overview
Presents projects for constructing and testing a variety of structures, including bridges, domes, and collapsible structures, and encourages readers to design their own.Presents projects for constructing and testing a variety of structures, including bridges, domes, and collapsible structures, and encourages readers to design their own.
Synopsis
Presents projects for constructing and testing a variety of structures, including bridges, domes, and collapsible structures, and encourages readers to design their own.
Children's Literature
The gateway to physics, architecture and engineering appears when this book is opened. It is a book of projects, one of a series, which offer an outstanding primer for the understanding of structures. For example, how do bridges carry the weight that crosses over? How can the strength of a bridge be demonstrated with common objects? The projects are described with concise language using excellent, colorful graphics. The text relates human-made structures to natural structures such as eggs, shells, spiderwebs and our own skeletons. Readers will learn to construct domes, containers, packages for fragile objects, four basic bridge designs and more. All chapters are brief. The beginning chapters are intended to introduce materials used in projects--paper, modeling clay, string--and to test their strength and stability using varied shapes and balancing forces. A "Getting Ideas" section ends a chapter and provides the nudge for independent work using the knowledge gained. The book would serve fourth grade teachers well as a manual for a series of hands-on science lessons. The importance of saving resources when designing structures in another appealing feature of this book.