On Monday 2 March, 15 students visited the Sir John Soane's Museum in Holborn. They learnt how to make concrete, using the right proportions of water, sand, cement and gravel.
Each group made four concrete bars with different thicknesses of reinforcing steel. Concrete reaches its optimum strength after a couple of weeks, so we returned on 30 March to see who had made the strongest concrete bar.
We worked with an architect who had designed a machine which uses levers to test up to a weight of 450kg, using only three students. The machine was like a see-saw. The students were nervous when they had to walk along the machine, increasing the force on the bar. We didn’t know when the concrete was going to break – and when it did it gave the testers quite a jolt!
We collected lots of data about the strength of different types of concrete, and our winning bar held 420kg.
This was a fantastic trip which linked well with our specialism of Design and the Built Environment. We look forward to continuing our links with the Sir John Soanes Museum in the future.
Robert Davighi, Assistant Principal, Science & Maths |
