Build a Da Vinci Bridge with Your Kids

My daughter’s school has a tinkering lab where the kids get to go to do STEM stuff, build things and work on projects.

Recently one of the classes made a giant Da Vinci bridge, a self-supporting bridge design developed by Leonardo Da Vinci around 1486.

Their version was made with large pieces of wood and stands several feet high, but if you’d like to make a smaller-scale version, check out this tutorial from Frugal Fun for Boys and Girls.

Her version is made with craft sticks, and you do have to glue them together in advance to make pieces that are long enough to build the bridge from, but other than that the bridge can be put together without adhesives, and it makes a really strong structure, too.

This is a great engineering project for kids, and you could give them the materials and see if they can figure out how to make a bridge out of them before showing them how Da Vinci did it. You can also test your bridge to see how much weight it holds, and talk about why such a bridge might be useful (the original application was meant to be for use in war, so the army could build a bridge, cross it with their supplies and take it down easily so the enemy couldn’t follow).

Have you ever made a Da Vinci bridge? I’d love to hear about it!

[Photo: Frugal Fun for Boys and Girls.]

When my daughter was younger I would spend a lot of time trying to come up with activities she could do in the car on long road trips and things to entertain her when we were waiting at restaurants and things that didn’t involve screens.

But it turns out there are a lot of great activities you can do with just a piece of paper and a pen.

What Do We Do All Day has a great collection of pen and paper games, including some that can be done with just one person, though they’re all more fun if you have at least two.

There are some classics on here like hangman and dots and boxes, but there are also quite a few I hadn’t heard of before.

I don’t want to spoil the whole list for you because you should definitely click over there and look around, but I will share about the one that you see pictured above.

This game is called Bridges, and you start by making the big random shape and the dividing it into a bunch of sections (the post says 30-50 sections is ideal but I think this one is smaller than that).

Each player gets their own color marker and you take turns drawing bridges from one space to another, crossing a third. Once there’s a bridge, no other bridges can start, end or cross in those spaces. Keep going until no more bridges can be built, and the person who makes the last bridge wins.

Check out the post over at What We Do All Day for more great ideas for no or almost-no prep games you can play with your kids or that kids can play together. I’d love to know if you have a favorite paper and pen game, whether it’s on this list or a different one.

[Photo: What We Do All Day]

Have you read?

Leave a Reply