AUBURN — Auburn Middle School eighth-graders on Team Bradbury recently tried a “crushing” new adventure. Students were challenged to build a structure out of balsa wood that would hold as much weight as possible.

Given 25 pieces of balsa wood, students got to work to design and build a structure, weighing no more than 15 grams, that would be placed in a device where they would see how much weight it would hold before snapping into pieces. The students had to try out many different types of glue to hold the pieces of wood together but, after a bit of decoration and planning, they were ready to go.

On Tuesday, May 9, students gathered in the gymnasium to witness the competition. There were four different groups of students, all hoping that their design would hold the most weight. Weights were placed to test the strength of the students’ structures. The strongest structures held 96 pounds; other structures held between 71 and 65 pounds.

“It’s so exciting to see these students who are working on mathematics become engineers,” said Mrs. Bucciantini, language arts teacher. “I had so much fun watching how much effort they put into building these compositions of art and engineering. In the end, when you see everyone adding up how much weight they had overall, they didn’t care about who won, but the reminiscing of the whole project.”

Auburn Middle School students were challenged to build a weight-bearing structure out of 25 pieces balsa wood. Here one of those structures is tested to see how much weight it will hold. The winner held 96 pounds. 

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