YHS physics students ponder weighty question

by Earlene Ward - Yosemite High School District

 

— Yosemite Union High School District/Earlene Ward

Photo left: Yosemite High School physics teacher Gary Sconce carefully lowers the three-pound board onto a team’s spaghetti structure.

 The weights the students will add are to his right.

 

Photo right: Ryan Newell-McCracken carefully places the first weight on the board as one of his teammates, Josh Loyst, looks on. Another teammate, Tyler Papike, is shown with his back to the camera. (Person in the far background is Nick Mellon).

 

How much weight can three ounces of uncooked spaghetti hold?

That was the question presented to students in Gary Sconce’s physics classes at Yosemite High School recently.

The record was set in 1998 when students constructed a design that held 168 pounds before breaking. The most weight held this year was 109 pounds by a structure built by Ryan Brazil, Ryan Miller, Ryan Summers and Cole Popovich.

Mr. Sconce explains that this exercise teaches students about gravity, engineering, distribution of force and normal force.

Working in teams of three to five people, the students build a structure out of the three ounces of spaghetti. On test day, a three-pound board is placed on the structure and then the students start adding steel weights. Very slowly and very carefully, the students lower the weights onto the board, beginning with the lightest ones.

After pausing a moment to be sure the structure is going to hold, they add another weight, and then another until the structure breaks.

“The weights were piled so high you couldn’t believe it when they got up to 109 pounds,” Mr. Sconce says.

As the students took turns testing their structures, there was a mixture of laughter and groans as they competed for the most weight.

This is an annual assignment in Mr. Sconce’s physics classes.