MOORPARK : High School Students Show That Strength Is in the Cards

Assembling quadrilaterals, triangles and octagons, the students in Tom Baker’s ninth-grade geometry class were desperately attacking their class assignment: how to build an 11-inch tower with index cards and a few staples that could support a 10-pound brick.

Baker sprang the assignment on his Moorpark High School students after a few days of discussing what shapes are structurally the strongest.

To make the assignment more intense, he charged the students an imaginary dollar for every card they used, every fold they made and every staple they required, making sure no one spent more than $1,000. And then he limited them to just 25 minutes.

“I don’t have the kind of personality that can take a lot of stress,” said 14-year-old Charity Katz, who with three fellow students struggled to come up with a design that would work.

This was Baker’s latest lesson in a long series of innovative hands-on teaching techniques. The author of two books on weather experiments for young students, Baker said he liked to challenge his math and geometry students with projects.

“I could give them a book and have them look at a lot of numbers, but would they learn anything?” he asked. “This is fun and challenging. You’ll be amazed at what they come up with.”

Some of the towers were short on function but long on style, collapsing immediately as the weight of the brick was placed on them. Others looked like they would be a challenge to knock down.

Using about 300 index cards doubled together and folded into scores of triangles, Mike Lawrence and Duy Nguyen, both 14, built a tower that supported a brick along with about half a dozen books and a heavy spiral notebook.

“I can sit on it even,” said Duy as he demonstrated.

Fernando Chavez, 14, whose group put together the most efficient tower, said the exercise achieved its purpose.

“Yeah, I think we learned something,” he said.