Spaghetti Bridge
Everybody in my family is a big spaghetti and pasta lover. I used to make a lot of accessories from pasta for my children such as bracelets, necklaces, earrings, etc. But today we decided to explore the use of spaghetti/fettuccine by transforming it into a solid structure.
This activity enables children (4-years and up) to design, draft, measure, and 3D visualize the final object. The following exercise requires good coordination, counting, and imagination and helps to develop fine motor skills, attention to details, and patience. A single strand of spaghetti is a fragile material, however, once a bunch of them glued together it could be very solid.
The following steps and illustrations will describe how we made our bridge. To make it easier we used fettuccine (flat thick pasta) instead of spaghetti.
Materials: spaghetti, piece of paper, tape, Sharpie, ruler, paper glue or hot glue gun (if you have one)
First, we made a scheme of the bridge, considering that it shouldn’t be longer or wider than the spaghetti strands that we are going to use.
Laid the spaghetti strands over our drawn design to cut them to the right length. You can tape down the edges to hold them in place.
Glued spaghetti together.
Laid out the second layer perpendicular to the first one.
Made two more layers to make sure the bridge is strong.
Glued all the layers together.
Made the side parts of the bridge
Glued the side parts to the base of the bridge.
Let it dry