This educational tool is intended for all categories of school, from kindergartens to technical universities, in order to develop technical potential in children from an early age and thus indirectly foster their future interest in engineering.
The construction kit comprises parts that can reassembled for constructing up to 11 types of suspension and 3 types of arched bridges, whereby the basic static and dynamic principles of the respective type of structure can be explained. The assembled types of structure are a faithful copy of real bridges, including their basic static effects, which helps to better understand through play the basic principles of the behaviour of these structures, including the possibilities for affecting such behaviour, e.g. by re-arranging the parts.
With an assembled model, children, young people and adults without any special technical knowledge can understand some of the problems influencing bridge design in practice. The single parts of the construction kit also enable other bridge variants to be assembled according to the user’s imagination, whereby successfully assembling a loadbearing system without any additional supporting parts (i.e. pieces not included in the construction kit) will develop their static thinking.
The construction kit can also be assembled using the trial and error method, which means it is also suitable for use in kindergartens, where it could be used primarily as a toy. At secondary vocational schools and universities, the model will be used to understand how a structure functions and as a practical illustration of the distribution of the internal forces in a structure.
The foremost advantage of the model is that it does not require any advanced technical knowledge to be assembled (also on the part of a teacher), and any misunderstanding as to the principles of a structure’s behaviour are immediately reflected in the model, which helps users to decide which solution is correct and why.
The Technology Transfer Office at BUT helped scientists with industrial protection in the Czech market. The structure and design of the construction kit are protected as Czech utility model No. 24734 and industrial models No. 35354 and No. 35350.
