What other structures can you build with the materials you have available? Can you build a bridge or an airplane? Don't forget to come up with some design requirements before you start sketching and building!.There are a lot of considerations that go into building a functional and stable house. If you want to explore building more elaborate structures, you might consider switching from graham crackers as a building material to gingerbread, as it is less fragile, or you might want to change your gingerbread recipe to optimize its strength.Īs you can see, building a house, even if it is just a gingerbread house, is not as easy as it might seem. Royal icing hardens more quickly and is stronger and stiffer than other icings like buttercream or whipped cream frosting. In the example of your gingerbread house, the mechanical properties of the royal icing are very important. Before the building of a house can begin, an engineer first must consider each material's mechanical properties, such as strength, weight, toughness, or elasticity, to determine if the material is appropriate for its purpose. If materials within the structure begin to deteriorate due to corrosion, wear, rot, or fatigue, they can cause failure of the whole structure. When designing a house, selection of the right materials is another critical factor. This is especially problematic if the wall is supporting other structures of the house such as the roof. For example, if a wall leans to one side and is not upright, it can tip over and collapse. These are usually caused by weak structures due to inappropriate geometric design or material choice. If the design is stable, then all the forces acting on the building are balanced and will not weaken the structure or cause the structure to collapse. Forces come from many sources: gravity, people inside, weight of building materials, weather, and the environment. An engineer designs a building to withstand all the forces (things that push and pull on the building). So, what keeps a house from collapsing or toppling over? It all has to do with the forces that act on the building or its individual components. This means that the house must be able to support its own weight to prevent any deformation (bending), breaking, or catastrophic failures, such as collapsing. An important aspect of building a house is to make sure that it stays upright and keeps its shape, which is known as its structural integrity. As the engineer and architect, you need to plan and design the structure you want to build and make sure it meets all the design requirements. This process of repeatedly designing, building, and testing, called iteration, is used by real engineers and leads to the best possible final design!īuilding a gingerbread house is similar to building a real house.
Testing and observing your design allows you to identify weak spots that can be fixed in future designs. If your gingerbread house failed the stability tests, don't worry. If the icing is still soft, any pressure put on the joints may make them come apart. You might have also noticed that it is important to let the icing dry and harden before moving on with building. Applying enough icing is key to holding the individual parts of the house together. This is why the amount of royal icing, or glue, used for building your gingerbread house makes a big difference. When testing your gingerbread house on the shake-table, one observation you probably made is that the weak points of a design are often the joints where different parts of the structure come together. For example, if you built a wall that leaned to one side (rather than standing up straight) it is likely that the wall might collapse if you tried to build on top of it. This is especially important for walls that connect your house to the ground as they must transfer the load from the rest of the structure to the ground. Securing the walls and connecting the different parts of the house properly with icing is crucial to keep the gingerbread house from falling over. The most difficult part was probably keeping all the walls and roof upright and preventing them from collapsing while building. You might have found that it is not as easy as it seems to build a stable gingerbread house. If all the materials you used to build your gingerbread house are edible, you can eat your creation.
Store-bought royal icing should be kept in an airtight container and can last up to 5 days at room temperature.
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