Popsicle Bridge

This project was designed to show the different fundamental concepts of force and how they affect us in everyday life through observing that force affects everything including bridges. The project was to use 50 popsicle and carry a minimum of 5 pounds and have a span a foot gap. I took this as a challenge to build the best bridge possible as I have already had experience with this project and tried to build the strongest bridge with the limited materials. The limit of materials was my biggest issue and planning how many I was going to use beforehand.

My bridge was a Truss bridge that consisted of 67 popsicle sticks and held 25 pounds without any damage. The way that I tested this was to tie a string around the bed and then tie a 12 pound laptop to it and place a few more misc. items that I weighed out beforehand on top of the computer.

I used half width popsicle sticks because I could not find full width ones so I figured it would be fine if I went over the maximum a little. From my previous experience in building bridges I had found that building a truss bridge was the best option because of the distance and the relative ease in building one.

When I was younger, in 7th grade, I built a bridge out of 75 sticks that held 59 pounds before it broke and I tried to use a similar layout. The issue that I had with this bridge was that I screwed up on a few of the angles making the bridge slightly lopsided and weaker in a few points.
I had originally designed the bridge with top lateral bracing but afterwards I realized that it was giving me diminishing returns because of how I could put the pieces together so I removed them to lower the amount of sticks I used. At this point I was also running low on glue and so I had to cut back on a few things.  

(no calculations were done I knew to get the triangles as close to equilateral triangles and I knew a truss would be best because it is the easiest to make that is strong)