With just one month left of school, our “boys vs. girls” construction challenge is about half-way complete. The two farmstands are starting to take shape after many rounds of design development, prototyping, and the production of working shop drawings. Here is the breakdown:

Girls (aka “Team Quad-X”): The girls’ design consists of a three-walled cube made up of smaller cubes, set on a base. The entire structure will be picked up and moved, as a single unit, to its destination in either downtown Lewiston-Woodville or on a rural road near a family farm (this ability to be moved on a trailer bed was one of the design requirements and also dictated the 10-foot x 10-foot maximum footprint). The girls have been hard at work constructing the smaller cube modules, which will be stacked together in semi-random patterns to form the three walls.

Model of girls’ farmstand

Boys (aka “Team Genie”): The boys’ team was inspired by the motion of a magic carpet (some say it looks like an elephant, too), hence their team name, “Team Genie.” The structure itself is formed by parallel ribs which come up and over a central selling space and fly out in a cantilevered awning. The rounded shape of the ribs is formed by cutting individual segments out with a jigsaw, then bolting them together with steel reinforcement. Atop the ribs, the siding will run horizontally, creating the smooth external surface for the farmstand. The boys are working on assembling each of the ribs, and have also cut out many of the siding strips, which will be painted in dark gray with the occasional green strip. Because the structural ribs require steel enforcements, the boys are also learning new skills in the metalshop- welding, cutting, and grinding the required steel pieces.

Model of the structural ribs (without siding)