We love when food and STEAM converge! This is a super simple activity that will teach you little ones about structural engineering, and help them learn the difference between 2D and 3D objects. Take a look at the video, and when you’re ready, check out the instructions below so you can do it yourself at home!
Sophia had a ton of fun with this activity because she was able to eat as she built her structure! If your kiddos are like her, make sure they don’t eat any marshmallows that have already had a toothpick in them. You never want an accidental splinter to come out of the toothpick!
Experiment Instructions
For printer-friendly instructions for this experiment, click HERE to download the lesson plan.
What’s the STEAM?
So, what’s the STEAM behind this activity? When building our skyscrapers, we’re making design decisions like artists and we’re also making stability and mathematical decisions like structural engineers. Sometimes our skyscrapers topple before they get tall, and other times, we’re able to build them really, really tall! When we’re able to make them tall, it means we’ve made good decisions regarding its structure. The triangles are really good to use for building tall skyscrapers because they can hold their shape under pressure!
To begin building our structure, we started with a square and a triangle. In mathematics these are called 2D, or 2-dimensional shapes. With 2-dimensional shapes, we can measure the height and width. Height is how tall something is, and width is how wide it is. 2D is also just a fancy way to describe shapes that lay flat. For example, when we draw shapes on paper, they’re 2D because they’re flat on the paper and we can only measure their height and width. When shapes can “stand up,” or look like they’re standing up on paper, we call those 3D shapes or polyhedrons. With these kinds of shapes, we can measure their height, width and depth! Isn’t it amazing how all of this comes together?
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