Spaghetti Bridge

Growing up, there have always been several “stereotypical” school projects that I would hear about from others as well as from the T.V. One such project was the classic spaghetti noodle bridge.
About a month ago, I, as well as the rest of my class, was assigned to construct a bridge out of nothing but spaghetti and glue. The bridge had certain height, width, weight and span requirements, and the finished product was expected to hold 1000 kg for ten minutes.
It was one of those projects where the idea behind the assignment seems fun, (who doesn’t want to make a bridge out of noodles?) but once the project is started, it is not fun at all.
My group and I (four people) worked many hours on trying to make a decent noodle bridge that would get us a decent grade, but all we accomplished was meeting all the project requirements except being able to hold the 1000 kg weight for ten minutes. Which surprisingly only docked five points off our overall grade. We ended up with a B for the project, a grade we were all very pleased with!
Our bridge ended up looking very elementary, and overall the experience was very embarrassing (some of my classmates had very, very good bridges!) I am so glad this project is behind me, and I hope I will never have to construct anything like that out of noodles and glue again! (Though if I ever did have to make another noodle bridge, I would have a better idea of how to go about doing so!)

Here’s a picture I found of a really good bridge. Ours turned out looking nothing like this one! The site I found the picture on can be followed through the following URL: http://images.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3116/2446453088_339f1637da.jpg&imgrefurl=http://www.flickr.com/photos/vio/2446453088/&usg=__kDW6fEA8Xh77W07HQmXDLGDoHwA=&h=455&w=500&sz=201&hl=en&start=7&um=1&tbnid=vV3zKloyKEk9DM:&tbnh=118&tbnw=130&prev=/images%3Fq%3Dspaghetti%2Bbridge%26hl%3Den%26client%3Dsafari%26rls%3Den%26sa%3DN%26um%3D1