[taeric]

Exactly! I think this scenario alone would be an amazing set of lessons for many grade schools.

Move this into modeling and then guessing stuff like bridge tensions, and you can easily show what many of the maths are good for.

We used to have this with the attempts at building tooth pick bridges and such. Which I still think is very illuminating. But, I think there are a lot of questions you can expose with models that were often only seen by the more advanced students. And again, I agree that getting people to mentally model these things is a good goal. Right now, people rarely ponder things on paper, it seems.