Wednesday, Aug. 8, 2007
by Melissa J. Brachfeld | Staff Writer
Proving that spaghetti is not just for dinner, the students of Johns Hopkins University’s Engineering Innovation summer program used the noodles to build intricate, miniature bridges and then wrecked them — all in the name of science.
On Friday afternoon, the eight high school students participating in the competition pitted their engineering know-how against one another to see whose bridge could hold the most weight before splintering into pieces.
The competition closed out four weeks of study under the summer program, which was taught by Muhammad Kehnemouyi, a full-time physics professor at Montgomery College, and Fred Katiraie, a full-time math professor at Montgomery College.
Kehnemouyi said his goal for the program was to expose the students to several aspects of engineering, such as robotics, statistics and digital logic, in a fun and entertaining way.
‘‘Many students don’t know what an engineer does. They don’t know what the different fields of engineering do. It’s great to expose them to the field of study,” he said.
The spaghetti bridge project, he said, turned out to be more relevant than he had thought it would be in the wake of last week’s Minneapolis bridge collapse. He said he and Katiraie discussed the disaster with the students.
At about 7 p.m. EDT Aug. 1, the eight-lane Interstate 35W bridge in Minneapolis collapsed, sending dozens of vehicles and their occupants into the Mississippi River. The Associated Press reported Tuesday morning that local dive teams have yet to recover eight people missing and believed dead.
In addition to the missing, the Associated Press reported that there are five known dead, and five victims remained in critical condition Tuesday.
‘‘Of course, it’s hard to pinpoint the reason why these things happen,” Kehnemouyi said. ‘‘I mean, fatigue could be the main reason, but then there could be other reasons there too. But you just talk about different reasons.”
He said after discussing the bridge collapse, he reiterated to the students that although they were just playing with spaghetti now, they could someday be designing real bridges.
‘‘I wanted to teach them the fact that a good design matters and that human lives depend on those designs,” Kehnemouyi said.
As the students, divided into three small teams, gave their pasta bridges one more look and joked about whose bridge would reign supreme, Kehnemouyi explained that each of the groups had to design and construct a load-bearing bridge made only of spaghetti and glue.
He said the bridges had to be free-standing and span two level surfaces, which were, in this case, tabletops that stood roughly a foot and a half apart.
The deck of the bridge had to be roughly an inch and two-thirds wide and could not be taller than roughly 8 inches from the lowest to highest point of the structure.
The team of Hunter Zhao, 16, of Gaithersburg, Roshan Rajeev, 16, of Rockville, and James Neal, 17, of Washington, D.C., went first.
Gingerly holding their bridge, the young men flipped it over and placed it between the two tabletops. As they attached a metal link chain to a wooden platform mounted on the deck of the bridge, one team member began to place weights on the chain. The weights could be added in any order with the only rule being that the weights could not touch the floor.
The team and class became increasingly excited as weight after weight was placed on the chain with no sign of wreckage.
Finally, the bridge cracked, but not before bearing 52 times its weight, Kehnemouyi said.
Kevin Cho, 16, of Oak Hill, Va., and Arshin Khodaei, 17, of Great Falls, Va., whose bridge was the smallest and lightest, were part of the next group to compete. However, after only four weights, the bridge broke.
‘‘We still got, like, 37 times our weight and that’s still really good,” Cho said.
The last team to go consisted of Sruti Bharat, 17, of California, Rohan Bhale, 15, of Olney, and Justin Yin, 17, of Wheaton. The group put weight after weight on the bridge and attached another chain to add more weights, but the bridge remained in one piece.
After adding all the weights available to them, Katiraie ran into another room to retrieve more. The team’s bridge held almost 60 times its actual weight before splintering.
Bharat, who was in Maryland visiting relatives, said the key to her group’s success was teamwork.
‘‘I think we succeeded because not one person did all the work, so we all kind of had our own individual tasks and everyone was pretty even in what they brought to the table,” Bharat said, adding that the teams had one week to build their bridges.
But she said their secret weapon might have been the glue holding the bridge together.
‘‘I think it held up so well mostly because we put on so much glue — we really used a lot of glue,” she said.
Although his team’s bridge held the least amount of weights, Cho said he still enjoyed the project.
‘‘It was going to break eventually, but I was kind of disappointed to see how we got below everyone,” he said. ‘‘It was still fun, though.”
