A flagpole has stood in our town square for as long as anyone can remember. Through wind, snow, summer storms and quiet mornings — it has not fallen once. So what is it that actually holds it up?
In eleven days, every Norwegian household will be waving a flag. Before that arrives, your child can build their own miniature flagpole out of paper straws, cardboard and a little glue — and uncover a secret engineers have known for three thousand years.
Why doesn't a flagpole topple over?
A flagpole stays standing not because it is heavy, but because it is triangular — on the inside.
Lay four paper straws on the table and tape the corners into a square. Push gently on one corner. The square skews into a parallelogram. The sides are still the same length, but the shape has given way. That is a collapsing structure.
Now make a triangle from three straws. Push on a corner. It does not move. You can press hard, and the triangle holds. The only way to change its shape is to break a straw or rip a corner apart — and that needs far more force than any breeze can deliver.
This is the triangle's superpower, and it is the reason every flagpole in the country has hidden triangles inside its base. Cranes, bridges, the roof above your head, the pylons that carry electricity across the mountains — all of them stand on triangles you rarely notice. When something has to stay still in the wind, an engineer finds three points and connects them.
The same simple geometry — one shape that cannot twist — lets a flagpole made of light straws stand as firmly as one made of solid steel.
Why this matters for children
Norway's LK20 curriculum asks early-school children to explore and describe properties of two-dimensional figures, and to investigate forces and motion through simple experiments. That sounds technical, but it points at something concrete: children should feel how a shape behaves when something pushes on it.
No textbook can deliver that lesson. The fingers have to feel a square give way while a triangle refuses to. The child has to watch the little flagpole wobble, work out why, and add the one slanted brace that changes everything. That is engineering thinking in very small hands.
The best part is that the task is open-ended. There is no single right answer for how to build the pole — only one goal: it should stay upright when you blow on it. A child can choose four braces or two. They can experiment with how high up the braces attach. They can build a wide, low base or a narrow, heavy one. Each version produces a new result the child can test, observe and improve. It is the same loop that engineers at any aerospace or offshore firm use when they design something new: build, test, adjust, build again.
When the flagpole stands finished on the breakfast table on the morning of May 17, the child carries more than a craft project. They carry a new way of seeing the world. Suddenly triangles appear everywhere — in the bicycle frame, in the rafters above the kitchen, in the bridges that carry the train across the fjord.
Try it at home: build your own May 17 flagpole
You need very little.
✅ Three long paper straws (or bamboo skewers of equal length) ✅ A square of stiff cardboard, around 12 × 12 cm, for the base ✅ Masking tape or a glue gun (a grown-up handles the glue gun) ✅ A pencil and a ruler ✅ A small Norwegian flag, or paper to draw one ✅ A button, cork piece or small stone to weigh down the base
Suitable for: 5–10 years
⚠️ A grown-up helps with the glue gun and with cutting the small hole in the base.
How to do it:
- Draw a cross on the cardboard base — two lines meeting in the middle. Cut a small, snug hole where the lines cross, just big enough for one straw to push through.
- Press the first straw straight down through the hole. It should stand vertical and stick about one centimetre out below the base. Glue the straw firmly above and below the cardboard.
- Tape a button or cork piece to the top of the base, around the straw. This is the flagpole's miniature concrete foundation — it lowers the centre of gravity.
- Cut the other two straws on a slant at each end. These will be the braces — the engineer's secret weapon.
- Glue each brace from the outer edge of the base up to the middle of the main pole. Each brace forms a triangle with the pole and the base. Those triangles are what hold the whole thing in place.
- Draw or attach the little flag at the top. Hoist it carefully and test: blow against the pole. Press lightly on the top. Does it stand?
What happens if you build the pole with only one brace instead of two? What happens with no braces at all? And what happens if you attach the braces high up on the pole, near the flag, instead of low down near the base?
Questions to wonder about
- Why are almost all real flagpoles round, and not square?
- Why does a tall flagpole bend most often in the middle, rather than at the very top or the very bottom?
- If you were to build the world's tallest flagpole, what would stop you first — the wind, the weight, or something else entirely?
Closing
The next time you walk past a flagpole, look down at the base. If you can see ropes pulling outward, those are the visible triangles. If you cannot see anything, the triangles are hidden inside the concrete — but they are there. They have to be. Otherwise the pole would have fallen the day it was raised.
Every child is made of good atoms. At Good Atoms we help them discover it.