This was a job that I had to do when I worked as a technician at my school. Year 8 were looking at structures, specifically bridges, in their DT lessons. The head of KS3, my boss, wanted me to make a river valley for them to test some paper straw bridges over. He also wanted me to make an example paper straw bridge.
I set to work recycling a recycling bin and chopping an irregular shaped v into the longer two sides with a jigsaw. I then drilled a number of holes jest below this new edge. I attached two wooden blocks underneath the handles. I then put chicken wire over the top and using other wire I tied it down using the predrilled holes. Next I used mod-rock to produce a hard surface. Once this was almost dry I used a coarse clay mix and added a more textured earthy looking surface. I attached two more wooden blocks at the top which were to be used as the foundations for the bridges. I then marked a water line in the bottom of the valley, took a photo from the top, pasted the photo into some cad software, scaled it to the correct size, traced the line on the image using the spline tool and then printed the cad design off. I then used this profile to cut out a piece of clear acrylic and place it neatly into the bottom of the valley. I painted the top wooden blocks to look like concrete.
Finally I built a bridge to the correct dimensions out of paper straws and tested its loading capacity using a box of nuts and bolts. This was a quick little construction and took me only about a day and a half.
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