In Science World’s December 10, 2018, issue, we asked readers to enter our Gingerbread House Contest. It challenged students to use information from the article “Home Sweet Home” to build sturdy, multilevel gingerbread houses. We selected three winners from the mound of entries that poured in from across the U.S.
Here’s what the winning teams had to say about the engineering challenge. Megan Napier’s eighth-grade science students at Salem Middle School in Salem, Indiana, built a two-story gingerbread restaurant. They felt the toughest criteria was creating it entirely out of food. Laura Callahan’s seventh-grade science class at Most Precious Blood School in Walden, New York, said they learned how to plan, revise, and problem solve. Doing so helped them design a snowy gingerbread house that survived a shake test. And Chris Anderson’s sixth-grade students at Mason Intermediate in Mason, Ohio, tested different icing mixtures to hold up their holiday home.
Mason Intermediate student Malia Requejo says, “If you work together and communicate, you can achieve anything.”