Sixth Grade Students Must Scale and Strengthen their Ambitions

First, Mr. Dimen requires his sixth grade students to define the problem and then plan and design a solution to that problem.  This week, his students are creating paper and pasta bridges.  This is a mini-STEM project in which students apply the engineering process, learn to manage constraints and model solutions. The engineers have paired up and have named their firm. Each firm has been given $5000 virtual dollars to buy materials - fettuccine, vermicelli, linguini, or spaghetti. Each type of pasta has a different tensile strength, thus the engineers have to consider both material and cost (the wider and denser fettuccine is $500 a piece, for example) when designing their bridge. The engineers will test the bridges on Friday and see which structure will hold the greatest load before collapsing. However, the "winner" of the project is the structure with the lowest Efficiency Ratio of cost to load, that is the lower the  cost, the higher the load, the better the structure!