ICE President's Visit

The ICE President Geoff French came to see the bridge in action on 1st April at Durham Highschool for girls. He was joined by Amy Wright, an old pupil of the school who was highly commended in this year's NCE Graduate Awards. Geoff shares our passion for engaging future engineers and we were very pleased to show him the work that we have been doing with the help of ICE graduates and students. You can see the ICE press release here.

With plenty of time scheduled and some very bright students, we were able to add in another activity to explain more about the day to day job of a civil engineer. The pupils were split into two groups and given large maps of Durham city centre and asked to suggest locations for a new bridge. They had to think about where it would be needed and hazards that might be encountered. There were some really good points raised which were shared with everyone at the end of the exercise.


Now for the fun part! Every session went very smoothly with some excellent displays of teamwork. The President even got roped into some heavy lifting and volunteered to be the first test subject when the scaffolding was removed.
A big thank you to the school, all the helpers visitors across the day and particularly to NCE for the photos (much better than our usual lot).
Please let us know if you would be interested in volunteering. More photos below!

Fordley Primary School

This week we were in Dudley with the North Tyneside Education Business Partnership again, building the bridge with year 3/4's and 5/6's. They showed some excellent teamwork in quite large groups. Half term is now upon us and the bridge is out of action until March so we're going to explain one of the most important parts of the bridge, the deck!

Pin

Scaffolding 

Deck

To put the deck up, every child has a particular job: they work in pairs to carry a piece of the deck, some are in charge of the pins used to hold the pieces together and some make sure that the scaffolding is in the right place. Everything must happen in the right order and be dismantled in the exact opposite way.


1. A pair of pins are put into place on the base plate of the bridge. 

2. Slide the piece of deck onto the pins. You can see the hollow metal tubes to the side where they slide together.

3. Before the children let go of the deck, there must be a piece of scaffolding under it to make sure the bridge is supported as it is being constructed (we use blocks of foam).

4. The two middle piece are different to the rest. One side has in-built pins that slide out to join the two halves together.

5. Once all the pieces are fully joined up, the cables can be attached.

Greenfields Primary School

This week the bridge was out in conjunction with North Tyneside Education Business Partnership. The project has arranged for ICE as well as several other businesses and organisations to promote various employment options that are available to the children in the future. All of the year 3/4 and 5/6 classes were well behaved and excellent at gradually tightening the cables so the bridge was level.

This blog will look at the a-frames of the bridge, from which the cables are suspended. Its quite clear where they get their name!

As mentioned in the previous post, there is a colour-coding system to ensure the longest cables are attached to the highest part of the frame.

The frames are bolted to a board at the beginning of assembly so the children can reach to attach the cables. It pivots around this bolt as it is lifted into place and another is used to secure it in the upright position.

The frames take the compressive load due to gravity that is acting on the bridge down to the ground. The children often understand this load path instinctively so it is important to reinforce the physics behind this and explain that they have just completed their first bit of structural engineering!