Your Perspective

For this section, you are going to participate in some activities that were designed to clarify certain important concepts related to bone structure and strength. Student Investigation 6.1 involves an activity that will demonstrate how bone growth characteristics in our limbs are related to our overall skeletal structure, particularly our height. You will be asked to measure the upper arm bone and the heights of a number of different students. From this data you will participate in a graphing exercise that will demonstrate for you how the length of the bone in the arm is related to a person's height.

Student Investigation 6.2 involves an activity that will help you understand how different materials compare in their strength characteristics. We will examine how the size (or cross-sectional areas) and the kind of materials influence how well they can stand up against:

compressional (squeezing) forces,
tensile (stretching) forces,
torsional (twisting) forces.

For this activity, you will be responsible for predicting how various materials will respond to these external forces and then you will design and perform the actual experiment following certain guidelines. Finally, from the results, you will develop an understanding about how bones from people of different ages and sizes (height and overall body size) compare in strength. Let's get started!

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