Engineers Week | February 19-25, 2023

Updated: 03.01.23

CGA would like to encourage students at North Central and NE Iowa schools to participate in an engineering activity in their classrooms to celebrate Engineers Week (February 19-25).

THE ACTIVITY / ENGINEERING CHALLENGE

House of Cards:

https://discovere.org/stem-activities/critical-load-student-instruction/

This activity is appropriate for Grade Levels 3-12 and should take 45 minutes or less.

Instructions and materials required:

https://ieee-ac.org/TISP/pdf/criticalload.pdf

THERE’S A PRIZE!! Teachers, please work with your grade school, junior high, or high school students to do the above activity before February 22nd, 2023. The activity can be done at any time up until February 22^nd. For each class that participates, please have a teacher send your video to srottinghaus@cgaconsultants.com or share it on your school’s Facebook page the week of the event (February 19-25) and tag CGA (if this is not an option, it might be possible to put @CGAConsultants in the comments). Use the hashtags #CGAEngineersWeekChallenge #Eweek2023 #CreatingtheFuture

For each entry, your school’s name will be put into a drawing for one $500 cash prize to be put towards STEM education. The more classes/grades that participate, the more times your school’s name will be put into the drawing. To be eligible, the school needs to be in Iowa. The drawing will take place on February 27^th and we will announce our winner on social media as well as email the winning school.

Materials

12 playing cards
Scotch tape
A small cardboard platform (the bottom of a milk or juice carton works great, or you can cut down a pizza or cereal box)
And something small to use as your weights, like pennies or paper clips

Instructions

Identify the Problem
The most critical step of any engineering challenge is to understand the problem you are trying to solve:
- Using only 12 playing cards, how can you design a flat-topped structure that supports as much weight as possible without collapsing?
- You will need to think like a civil engineer to figure out the critical load. This is the amount of weight or force that causes a structure to fail or fall apart.
Brainstorm Designs and Build
- Spend a few minutes trying out different arrangements of cards to get ideas for which design would work best.
- As you build, see how much tape you need to secure your structure. You can use all 12 cards, but you don’t have to.
Test Your Design
- It’s time to test the strength, also known as the structural integrity, of your house! Will your house stay up when weight is added?
- When you are ready, place your cardboard platform on top of your structure and count how many pennies you can add, one at time, until it collapses.
- Be sure to add weight evenly. If your house falls down after only a few pennies, that’s OK. This is why testing is so important.
- How many pennies did it take for your structure to fail? Record the total number of pennies as your critical load.
- Or you can calculate the critical load in grams. A US penny weighs 2.5 grams.
Evaluate and redesign
- Think about any changes you would like to make using these questions:
  - How much weight did the house support? Could it be designed to support more?
  - Where is your structure failing? How can you strengthen the weak points?
  - Did the height of your card structure affect its ability to support the added weight?
  - What was the shape of your card structure? Is there another shape you can try?
Make Changes and Try Again!
- Redesign your house and test again.
- Were you able to increase the critical load?
- Looking for another challenge? Increase the difficulty by building without tape or by using index cards instead of playing cards.
Share Your Results with a teacher, parent/guardian, CGA, and DiscoverE!
- You can email photos to DiscoverE at social@DiscoverE.org or post on Instagram/Twitter using the hashtag #DiscoverEChallenge. Please note: @CGAConsultants must be tagged and/or you must email your video to srottinghaus@cgaconsultants.com to be eligible for the $500 STEM drawing!