Programs · Engineering
Load it until it tells you something.
Pasta bridges, cardboard chairs, a bike trailer that actually tows, and a planned catastrophe every November.
- Ages
- 10–14
- Meets
- Mon & Thu
- Capacity
- 12
- Shop
- Montavilla
Engineering is the program where things fall down on purpose. Kids build structures and mechanisms under a real constraint — a material budget, a weight limit, a span — and then we load them until they fail, and we measure how much it took. The failure is not the sad part. The failure is the data.
The term arc
| Weeks | Build | Constraint |
|---|---|---|
| 1–2 | Take apart a machine | Label every part you can name. Guess at the ones you cannot. |
| 3–4 | Pasta bridge | 250 g of pasta, 30 g of glue, 40 cm span. Load tested to destruction. |
| 5–6 | Cardboard chair | Must hold a staff member for ten seconds. No tape on the bearing surface. |
| 7–9 | Choose: trailer, go-kart, or kinetic sculpture | Must move under human power with a kid aboard. |
| 10 | Bridge Disaster | The annual public load test. Bring a raincoat. |
| 11 | Teardown and write-up | What held, what did not, and what you would change. |
The Bridge Disaster
Every November, the auditorium fills up, the pasta bridges go on two sawhorses, and we hang weight from the middle until something gives. There is a leaderboard, a tape measure, and a staff member whose only job is to sweep. Last year's record is 41.2 kg, set by two kids who used a triangular truss and refused to tell anyone their glue strategy.
The event is free and open to the public, and it is genuinely loud. It is also the single best recruiting tool we have; roughly a third of our spring engineering enrollment comes from kids who watched a bridge explode in November.
Kids want to build the exciting thing first. We make them build the boring thing first. The boring thing is what the exciting thing stands on. This is also true of adults.
What kids make
- A load-tested structure with recorded data, not just a photo of a bridge.
- One mechanism with at least two moving parts that does a job.
- A bike trailer (one per year, built by a team of four, used by the program afterward).
- A failure report. This is the assignment most kids resist and later describe as the useful one.
Pick two. Stay eleven weeks. Show somebody.
Every program runs one afternoon a week for a full term. Kids choose two, and we do not shuffle them around like a tasting menu.