Month: July 2025

Engineering: Structural Integrity For A Bridge. ⚙️

Kia Ora, Reader.

As of right now, I’m writing this in the hall with no images nor videos of what we did yet, but we did just finish engineering, so I’ll tell you all about it. Starting at 9:30am, we were heading into the hall where we were greeted by Whaea Ruth. Where she presented engineering slides to us, after about a minute, we were told to be sorted into groups of four. After doing so, we were given a tin of Jenga, and told to make the tallest Jenga tower you could make. Exploiting the rules, people were using the actual tin, since it was never stated that using the tin was against the rules. Discovering this, most if not all the groups had used the tin, it was a fun activity to get us started in my opinion.

This is another group with their tower building.

The next instruction was to make bridges out of cardboard paper. When was I had something spark inside of me, a design with the exact same cardboard paper. It felt like Deja vu, having done the same thing before, but I had no idea when I’d done this. But I had got to work, telling my group to help me cut, tape, and put things together. It wasn’t finished but the product was good for it’s size, it may not be as good as the “Da Vinci” bridge, since there was only some tension holding it together, the rest being tape. But for the timeframe we were given, it was pretty bad, compared to others who had pillars, designs, inspiration. Our bridge came straight from the mind.

Overall, it was a cool engineering day, the Jenga, and the Bridges, in my opinion, the Bridges were the best, since it was pretty much a challenge between everyone, to see who could build the best bridge. It was fun seeing everyone work together to beat other people, I wouldn’t say our bridge was the best, but it was better than some.

You have reached the end of this blog post, thank you for reading. I’ll see you at the next blog.

25. Engineering Week 2: Building Bridges

Kia Ora

As of this day, we went to the hall and built bridges and designed them, but at first we watched videos on how they were controlled. Then we had to choose to be in a group of four, Next we looked at videos that presented bridges like the Bascule bridge in Whangarei that moves for boats, The next instruction Whaea Ruth gave was building the longest tower out of Jenga blocks without it falling , As a team of four we managed to make a tall building but we weren’t the tallest because we didn’t know you could also stack up the box containing the Jenga pieces.

After we finished that challenge Whaea Ruth gave us we were instructed to do the same thing but we had to the the pieces on an uneven terrain, Which means we had to stack up the pieces in a scrunched up cloth, It was hard and our tower kept falling down. In the end we didn’t make it work as it kept falling into pieces.

The last challenge we had to do was making a stable bridge out of cardboard, We were given scissors and the cardboard and 30 minutes too make the bridge, We made the bridge by ideas and no use of inspiration or reference, We ultimately built a steady bridge but we couldn’t build the entrance of the bridge with the limited time we were given.

Overall it was a fun learning experience that we had, Thank you for reading my blog.

Da Vinci Bridge -What?

Hello, This morning, we went to Engineering in the hall. When everyone arrived, there was excitement building inside of me as I saw a lot of poles and planks. In front of us was a group of engineers. After they introduced themselves and told us what we would be doing, we were sent to our activities in the lines that we were already in. For my group’s activity, we were doing the bridge that Leonardo da Vinci created. The aim of our bridge that we’re making is to build a sturdy bridge using chopsticks.

  • Posted by TJ

Bike Safety

Talofa lava, Reader!

Today we were given a task to make a DLO about Bike Safety. As you can see, there are two names on the work—mine and my friend’s—because we decided to work together. We thought it would be faster and easier since we both had different ideas about Bike Safety.

On the DLO, we wrote about why it is important to wear helmets and explained our 142 and ABC method for bikes and helmets. Our task was to write paragraphs about the different Bike Safety methods and explain why wearing a helmet is important.

Here is our DLO:

Thank you for reading my blog post and have a fantastic day!

  • Susana – Link for the original blog post

Civil Engi-nearly Collapsing

Hello, Reader! Lovely day’ innit. I hope you like my title, personally I found it funny because it actually relates to my experience building a Straw Tower! Crazy, right? Well it was chaotic.

For the next 6 weeks on Wednesday’s, we’ll be focusing on Engineering. This week on Wednesday, we found an interest in civil engineering—our topic this week of engineering. The three classes who took part in the engineering were; Room 10, 9 and 2. (Just the senior students) Then, all three classes were brought into the hall and were met with two civil engineers along with three construction engineers.

As our classes settle into four rows, one of the engineers introduces herself and shows us to each station with different things present on the tables our rows will be looking at. There was a station focusing on making paper towers, the one I did were straw towers, another station worked on a decent sized bridge, then the last station at the end of the hall were using bamboo to make a bridge Da Vinci style 🔥.

My row was brought to the straw tower station, met with five tables. There are supposed to be three people on each table but I’m assuming there were way too many people to split into three that’ll fit in five tables, so some groups had more than three— not mine though.

On the tables were straws, scissors and a limited amount of blue duct tape. Our goal was to make a tower sturdy enough to hold two ping pong balls 12 inches (30 cm) away from the table. We sat through watching a video talking about the challenge and there were rules; no taping the ping pong balls in ANY way and the tower has to be freestanding. Each table had limited straws as well, we had to use 20. My group made a pyramid, we used and taped straws to make a square for our tower to stand, then taped straws on each corner extending out. We gathered all four straws found on each corner to the middle and taped them to make a pyramid — then proceeded to cut in half and tape two other straws on each side, then for its other half to extend onto that half for the ping pong balls to sit on. Our tower wasn’t 30 cm tall, I’m pretty sure we were like… 8 cm off? That’s what I estimated.  In the end, we succeeded! We finished our objective and managed to hold two ping pong balls.

That’s all for today, thank you for reading! If you have any questions or liked anything about my post, inform me in the comments! Bye!