They said it couldn’t be built. Seventy-five years later, the Golden Gate Bridge has carried more than a billion cars across the San Francisco Bay. Among the 75 ideas for celebrating the GGB birthday (May 27) are “Inspire the next generation of ‘chief engineers’ by taking kids to a science museum” and “Help your kids build balsa wood bridges and hold a contest to see which bears the most weight.”
Howtosmile.org activities can show you how to engineer bridge models not only from balsa wood but from all kinds of inexpensive and easily found materials—chairs, string, clay, index cards, straws, blocks, toothpicks, cardboard, books, popsicle sticks, newspaper, even marshmallows and spaghetti! The Golden Gate Bridge is a suspension bridge. To test that particular kind of design, try What Gives? Design and Build a Bridge That Holds Heavy Weight, or Construction Technologies: Construct the Strongest Bridge, which lets learners build and compare a suspension bridge, a beam bridge and an arch bridge.