You and your bridge engineering group will need to choose a bridge to be the focus.  Hopefully you have bridges in your town or city that you could visit and/or research with you teachers help.  If not you will need to research a bridge indirectly using things as the internet, books and/or CD-ROMs.  You teacher and librarian should be able to help you with this.

While you are researching your bridge, you will need to focus on finding out some key pieces of information if possible.  The list is shown below, and you can get more information about each of them by clicking on the links.

The key questions you and your group should be focusing on during your research are:

• What local human needs does the bridge meet? 
• What things about construction site of the bridge affected its design? 
• What materials was the bridge constructed out of, and what are the advantages and disadvantages are there in using them? 
• What design style was chosen by the bridge engineers, and why?
• Were these any accidents involving this bridge?
• What safety features does the bridge have?
• Was the bridge expensive to build in terms of money, time or construction workers?
• What effect has the bridge had on the environment?

You should keep notes of what you find using your research log, which you can download and print out here.  You teacher or parent may want you to follow other procedures during your research.  Do whatever your teacher or parent suggests. 

As well make sure you are keeping track of where you found your  information so that you can easily create a bibliography when you create your report.  A page has been created for you to do that in the research log.

When you have finished researching your bridge you should move onto the exciting part: creating some designs by engineering them!