London Bridge, Please Don't Fall Down!

A bridge collapse can be a major disaster. Bridges that cannot hold enough weight to do their intended job can be a serious public safety issue. If they collapse, they can also cause economic damage due to costly rebuilding and people and companies scrambling to figure out how to circumvent the months of traffic impacts.

You are a civil engineer in your hometown. You have been asked to design and oversee the building of a new river bridge. You investigate how different bridge designs are ideal for different situations. Do some bridge designs hold more weight than others? Do they require more materials? What is the strongest bridge that can be built for the least amount of materials? To test your ideas, try your hand at building and testing a couple of bridges. (For this civil engineering project, try making your bridges out of popsicle sticks, basal wood, or straws.) Present your design and defend its strength to the board of supervisors in your town.

Once you complete your design and write your conclusions to defend your design,  save your file for you conclusion and a picture of your design in the appropriate place on the network.  You will then upload your conclusion and picture to this assignment link by clicking the Submit Assignment button in the upper right hand corner of this window.  Be sure to write in complete sentences in paragraph form using good spelling, punctuation, and grammar.  Proofread your work before you submit it.