This week Year 3 started their topic ‘Extreme Earth’.
We started the week by looking at natural disasters, thinking about why and how they occur and the effects that they have. When researching earthquakes we learnt about how they are most common on the edges of tectonic plates, so countries sitting on these fault lines have made structural changes to their buildings in order for them to better withstand an earthquake.
With this in mind, we set out to design our own buildings made of spaghetti and marshmallows to see if they could withstand our own earthquake (a plate of jelly)!
We applied many of the building techniques we had learnt to our own structures, such as a weight hanging down the inside of the building called a tuned mass damper.
Once we had built our structures, we placed them onto a plate of jelly to see if they would withstand an earthquake.
We had a lot of fun watching our structures wobble.
