Student Work Sampler

Getting familiar with patterns of student responses is part of expertise in teaching a particular activity. MOVIE 1 can give you insight into the types of solutions you students may come up with when doing this task.

Please note that many of these clips show students' design solutions to an earlier version of this challenge, where two lead weights were used instead of plastic water bottles, and the students could choose where to punch holes in the paper from which hang the bottles, rather than suspending them the holes in pre-punched paper. The newer version is a more constrained design task than before.

As you watch the different student tests, try predicting which bridges will fail, and where they will fail. Video clips included in first minutes of MOVIE 1 were shot by the Harvard-Smithsonian/Annenberg media group, and used with permission.