One of this year's Structure activities has been to create a balance toy. Last year, our 3rd ESO students made a balance bird and they learned and enjoyed it a lot. This year, as a center of gravity activity we decided to make a balance heart. 

Gravity is the force that pulls objects towards the earth’s center. In our everyday lives it’s the force that keeps us on the ground. The center of gravity is the point in which the weight of an object or body is perfectly balanced so that the object will not fall over. Objects with a lower center of gravity are more stable than those with a higher center of gravity. This is why it’s easier to tip over a water bottle than a tin can. The balancing toy as its name implies, balances. It utilizes the concepts of stability and low center of gravity. By having two heavy weights on the two sides, the toy will basically be pretty stable.  

Jeopardy! is an American television game show created by Merv Griffin. The show is a quiz competition that reverses the traditional question-and-answer format of many quiz shows. Rather than being given questions, contestants are instead given general knowledge clues in the form of answers and they must identify the person, place, thing, or idea that the clue describes, phrasing each response in the form of a question.

To review the contents of the unit before the final exam, we played this famous game in class as a review. To create a jeopardy game a web called Jeopardy Labs was used (https://jeopardylabs.com/). With this tool allows to build your own jeopardy template easily. The activity was very fun and the students reviewed the contents of the unit in a different way.

As a final activity of the Structures unit our 3rd ESO students made a contest that consists in building spaghetti towers using this material and marshmallows also as a final activity of the Structures unit. This yeard we did our third edition.

This year’s students did also the same activity. They gathered in groups of 4 or 5 with the same amount of spaghetti and marshmallows. The objective of the activity was to build a tower as high as possible using the given materials in 40 minutes. The aim of the task was to experience that the triangle is the most stable shape when a frame structure is built. When forces are applied to a four-sided structure with corner pivots (in this particular case, marshmallows) it can be easily forced out of shape. This structure is non-rigid. By adding a diagonal member, connected corners are held at a fixed distance. They can’t be spread apart or moved closer together. Despite pivots for corners, the structure cannot be forced out of shape, and is rigid. Notice that the additional member has formed two triangles in the structure. This is called triangulation.

The activity was performed in three different group classes. These are the winners: