Balsa Competition
Physics Build Balsa Towers
Students in the high school Physics class competed against one another to see who could build the strongest balsa wood tower to hold weight. The annual competition is lively and gets students involved in a “hands-on” engineering project that produces some stout towers. This year’s winners were Shelby B and Karlee A, who built a tower only weighing only 1.1 ounce that held 162 pounds of weight before it failed. Rhonda O placed second in the competition with a 0.76 ounce tower that held 96 pounds of weight. Third place went to Cooper B and Chesson S. The competition is based on the weight held to mass of tower ratio, so students have a lot of flexibility in design. Some build lighter towers that don’t hold as much weight but have a high ratio, and some go for the heavier towers that hold more weight. Next six weeks students will design windmills to do work as part of a unit on wind power, a growing technology in the Texas panhandle.