2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Scientists and engineers use their knowledge of how things break and bend to solve problems and design solutions to everyday challenges. This requires that they have an understanding of material properties. However, often when teaching about material properties, lessons focus specifically on what the material is made out of when addressing how this material might fail under forces. The geometry of the item is just as important in understanding failure! In this lesson, students will bend and break various types of pasta noodles (spaghetti, lasagna, manicotti) to determine how the varying geometry of a fixed material type impacts when and how the noodle breaks. Once students understand the role of geometry in structural properties, they will then investigate the role of material properties (e.g., ductile, brittle, modulus of elasticity) by keeping a fixed geometry and changing material type. This low-resource inquiry experience, when coupled with effective questioning strategies from the teacher, will help students deeply understand foundational concepts in solid mechanics (e.g., stress, strain, brittle, ductile). This lesson can be modified to be developmentally appropriate for the intended student audience (middle school, high school, or first-year engineering students) and takes approximately two 1-hour sessions to complete. Goals for students include critical thinking and problem-solving, communication and collaboration, application to real-world products and solutions, as well as a deep understanding of geometric and material properties.