November 2022 – Abhinav Kolachana

Spaghetti Tower Earthquake Science Task

Posted on November 25, 2022 by Abhinav Kolachana

Earthquakes are natural disasters that happen in our planet and cause tragedy and death to people and structures. Designing an earthquake-resistant structure that can survive the enormous vertical and lateral pressures produced by an earthquake has been a challenge for experts for a long time. Surface waves and P waves (principal) are the seismic waves that cause the most damage. In contrast to surface waves, which produce rolling forces like an ocean wave, P waves produce lateral forces. In science this term, we have been challenged to make a spaghetti tower that will withstand an earthquake and is over 60 cm tall using spaghetti and bluetack. We must follow the costs of $1 for 10 cm of spaghetti and $1 for 1 gram of bluetack. The project was flexible, which really put our ability to work in a team and solve problems to the test, just like an average engineer.

Engineering Process

We first started by doing a quick design sprint and building a tower with whatever design came to our mind. We soon found out that our design wasn’t holding well and collapsed within seconds of testing. Even though this was heartbreaking we learnt a lot about what we couldn’t do and what we could do. In the next lesson we went back and spent some time researching potential designs and reinforcement strategies. Next we tested our research and chose the main parts which helped us a lot and seemed to be of good use. We landed on our design of using triangles for the middle base and using the double reinforcement strategy to make certain that our structure didn’t collapse.

Brainstorm

Above is a picture of our brainstorm which included some of our first ideas when we thought of this project. We made this brainstorm before our first test in the design sprint phase of the whole project and looking back on it, this really helped us now. We were able to see where we were coming from and some ideas we could go back to if others didn’t hold up to par.

Research

This was the idea that we used in the end but instead of the faces being squares we made them triangles.

Cross Bracing

We found that this option was very time-consuming and required a lot of precision to carefully put the blue tack on the pasta and repeat it over again.

Weight Distribution

People make compact areas and then open areas throughout buildings with supports around it called load paths which take brunt of the impact and then is absorbed by reinforcements. Weight distribution is important especially when making this as pasta is very fragile and even with the slightest load it will crumble so distributing the weight into the right places and adding supports in the right places to maximize the height and the sturdiness of the overall structure is key. We do not want to break the budget by just supporting the building so making the structure of the building based of a sturdy foundations is essential as it determines where the centre of gravity is and whether one side has more pressure or not.

Our Design

The picture on the right was our first design and saw many improvements over the next few days. Our base was the structure of our design and we had to invest a lot of blue tack and spaghetti into it. We also ran into a lot of problems and things we needed to change around which I will address later.

Our first design testing P waves and S waves!

Improvements

Testing P waves and S waves after our improvements

The main improvement that we made was adding support sticks in the middle of our base as we noticed the base flexing a lot. Because we added these support beams the flexing of the base stopped and the tower was no longer in danger of suddenly breaking. We also added some more stability to the top 5×5 platform as we felt that it was going to fall off or break. Something else that we noticed was that over the duration of building and testing our structure we noticed that the pasta was getting old and cracking. If the whole tower would have broken when we were testing it in front of the entire class we would lose the challenge. We ended up changing the pieces of spaghetti that looked as if they would have broken. The final change that we made was removing some of the bluetack as we felt that we didn’t need it and increased the height of the tower to get more special points for the tallest tower. The improvements definitely helped and too a lot of stress off of our chests as we were worried of the base snapping while in the earthquake test.

Problems we faced

One of the main problems that I think other groups faced during the span of this project was collaborating as a team to an extent. I think that we actually collaborated quite well, although there were some times when we would get on each other’s nerves. We evenly distributed the workload by allocating positions to people in our team. For example, I was the Project Manager (makes sure that everyone understands the challenge and keeps the team on track), Seth was the Equipment Manager (makes sure that the materials needed for the task are available and that everyone cleans up after each session), Mayeul was the Speaker (seeks help from the teacher, other class members or outside experts) and Charlie was the Reporter (makes sure that the final presentation is ready by the deadline). Using this method we were able to plow through the project and have fun at the same time.

Conclusion

In conclusion, this project was really fun for all of us and we ended up spending $60 in total ($47 for spaghetti and $13 for blue tack). I think that we used our time well and we didn’t fall behind in any of our lessons. I would definitely recommend this project to anyone who is looking for a challenge and having some fun with friends.

Year 9 Camp Reflection

Posted on November 22, 2022 by Abhinav Kolachana

In life leadership exists every where and examples where you must work as a team grant themselves to you in different places. During the Year 9 Camp in Kalbarri, many opportunities for growth and leadership presented themselves to us. The Year 9 Camp, where we travelled to Kalbarri, gave us the opportunity to grow our friendship circles, grow mentally and face our fears. This is best demonstrated through the Kalbarri skywalk and cooking meals with our group.

Firstly, the Kalbarri skywalk was a tense experience for me as I have a fear of heights. It was quite funny when a little 3-year-old could easily walk across the bridge while I was grabbing on to the group. Everyone in my group supported me and helped me get across to the end of the metal peak hanging off the wall. This demonstrated that we were indeed capable of working as a team and supporting those who were having trouble. In life there will always be challenges and if we work as a team, we can overcome them and push forward together.

Secondly, the cooking the food for our group was fun and helped us work as a group. On the camp we had different roles for all the people in the group. Some people would take care of the trash for the food, others would help cook the food and someone else would lead us to different locations. Using this method, we were able to divide the work into roles to get the job done and it was much easier. Later in life this would help as we would have some experience working in a group.

In the end, Year 9 camp was the best experience of my life and if I could do it again I wouldn’t change a thing.

Media Term 4 Reflection

Posted on November 16, 2022 by Abhinav Kolachana

Describe the process you went through to create your production.

The process that we used was both efficient and let us get as much work as possible done. We first came up with several ideas for our project before settling on a semi-serious spoof of horror films. We settled on the concept of “The booty man,” inspired by the boogieman, whose premise was that if you repeated his name three times in the mirror, he would steal your cheeks. We made the decision to have the booty man possess someone by the name of Fahd Aliib when developing the storyline and storyboard. After storyboarding and completing the script, we headed outside to start filming. We tried a variety of different camera setups and special effects resulting in the production of Bootyman.

How did you come up with the original idea?

There were many ideas when we initially started to brainstorm, but finger boy, a super hero with an alien finger parasite, was our first one. After giving it some thought, we decided to create a parody of the boogie man that we called “the booty man” because we wanted to mock a specific genre. We sought to establish a type of “Jenkinsverse” while creating the booty guy by tying it to our prior character, “Old man Jenkins.” We made sure that our character was distinctive and stood out from any other characters making him more memorable.

Describe three obstacles or challenges that you encountered when creating your production.

One obstacle that we faced was the Year 9 OLP. Since we were all in rotation one, except Dylan we missed out on 2 weeks of recording/planning the Bootyman. To combat this we had to put our heads together and work really hard and not waste time as we were losing periods to film by the day. Another challenge we faced was the time that we had to film our scenes. In our film, if you look closely the fight scene was rushed and there were only around 10 or so shots in the scene in total. We had spent over 40% of our time on planning and even more time on other unnecessary scenes that we didn’t use anyway. We also spent way too much time scouting out a place, filming there, and then deleting the footage and not using it. The final challenge that we faced was, and something that I think we could improve on was the audio in pretty much all of our scenes. Especially in the opening scene where Fahd Aliib is digging his dog’s grave, the audio was alright but you couldn’t really hear the dialogue that well. In all of the other scenes, the audio was pretty much the same, meaning that it could be better.

What would you do differently next time?

As I explained before I think that we could definitely improve on the audio in some of our scenes as you couldn’t really hear the dialogue. A way in which we could have improved on this would be to do ADR. This is where you have a plant microphone in the shot and then record the dialogue again over the scene. This would have made the audio sound better and you would be able to actually hear the dialogue. Another thing that we could have improved on would be the fight scene. Since we were running out of time, we had to rush the fight scene and just put together a bunch of random shots. If we had made use of our time better then we could have made cooler shots and not having to kill off the chief so quickly.