Paper Chair Challenge

Imagine being asked by your instructor to build a chair out of paper that would be able to support your weight?  Impossible you might say?  Well that's exactly the challenge our 6th Grade Design Technology students were posed with just the other day.

The students were given large stacks of newspaper and a few rolls of masking tape to build their structures.  Pretty quickly they were able to come up with a few ideas on how to strengthen the newspaper by changing the shape of the pages.  Additionally, after a few attempts there even realized that to hold the weight they were placing on the chairs, they would need to build in some additional support.

Finally, it was time to test out our structures and the students took turns sitting on them one-by-one.  Some of the best looking chairs crumpled easily and quickly... while others amazingly stood up to the repeated weight placed on them.

Afterward, students participated in two learning labs where they learned about different types of loads and the forces they cause that act against the structures.  Using the Paper Chair Challenge Worksheet, students were able to reflect on a few of the things they learned including:

• "The newspaper and tape we used to construct our chair is the dead load because it doesn't change, but when someone sits on the chair they become the live load."
• "Each time someone would get on and off the chair, the loads would change causing major vibrations that could eventually damage the chair."
• "When we put weight on the chair we noticed that the legs or columns began to crunch, bend and twist being affected by compression, tension and torsion."
• "We used lots of triangles in our chair as a way to strengthen the legs and make the chair more stable."

Don't miss out on the exciting action of our testing.  Check out the following playlist of videos that show each of the groups in action testing out their sitting structures!



Thanks to PBS Kids Zoom for this great challenge idea and PBS and PBS Hawaii for the learning resources.

Image Appreciation:
Paper Chair by Xiaoli Dai