What the Heck Are We Doing?

This project began with a rather simple, to the point, essential question: How does one design the most efficient bridge by assessing materials and ensuring the support of a weight load? In essence, the challenge was to build a bridge that could support the most weight with the given materials, which were coffee stirrers, bamboo skewers, and wooden toothpicks.

             
With these materials in mind for the project, we also had to know that each of them had a certain cost that was attributed to them based on their cost in a store. As such, bamboo skewers were the most expensive and we calculated that their contest value would be $97 a piece. Then, coffee stirrers were the second most expensive coming in at $55 a piece, and lastly toothpicks cost $18 a piece.

With all this prior knowledge out of the way, we were able to determine the rules for our bridge building project, which were as follows

1. The bridge's cost could not exceed $2500 in materials
2. There could be no lamination (a successive build up of five or more consecutive layers (i.e. we couldn't make our bridge look like the above package of skewers).
3. The bridge had to be between 40 cm and 50 cm long with a width between 3 cm and 10 cm

These being the only real rules for the bridge, we set off on our bridge building journey.