Science Sunday: making a dam

As I mentioned earlier this week, we had a lot of rain, and our backyard flooded.  Jeff and I took that as an opportunity to teach the boys some engineering.  We challenged them to create a dam to stop some of the water.

Some of the challenges were the white waters in the stream, and the water flow was rapid enough to take away many of the building materials they could create.

They started by weighing down the big bucket with some rocks, then they remembered the huge pile of bricks in our backyard, but transporting them one by one is tedious and boring.

But a wagon……..  That’s easy and you get the amusement of pulling it through the water.

Eventually this is what they came up with.  It’s an odd combination of bricks, buckets, watering cans, and what have you, but it raised the water level on the upstream side about 6 inches, and the downstream side was significantly lower.

All in all a good spur of the moment engineering lesson.
Let’s see what others did this week:
Each week I’m spotlighting a few posts that were shared previously.  Many posts get linked up later in the week and they don’t always get as many clicks as they deserve, so I’m trying to spotlight a few every week.

I loved how Teaching Stars used bubbles to explain nuclear fusion.  BRILLIANT