Our Challenge for Science this year was to build a spaghetti tower that reached 60cm tall and a base smaller than 30cm by 30cm. We had a budget of $60, with one gram of blu tak costing $1 and a piece of spaghetti costing $1. I was in a group with Saskia Catalan and Anna Gray, the goal of this project was to build a spaghetti tower that simulates a building to resist 10 seconds of shaking which simulates an earthquake. This engineering assignment was fun to make, and I want to thank the teachers for coming up with this project.

The engineering process took us two weeks to complete overall, which included making designs, building our prototypes, doing a test, changing the prototype’s design, rebuilding the prototype, and doing a final test run. For the first part of our project, we had to draw a draft of what we wanted our tower to look like. To do this, Anna, Saskia, and I drew a design for our building, debated a few changes we needed to make and then drew a final detailed drawing. We constructed it using 40 25cm pieces of spaghetti, 20 grams of blu tack, a ruler, scissors and a board to build it on. While making it, we had multiple problems, such as the middle part of our tower wouldn’t stay upright, making it hard to support and build the final third layer. When we finished building, we tested it on the shaking table, which acts as an earthquake. The middle part of our tower came apart, so we redrew the design, fixed a few things on the design and finally rebuilt it for the final test. The test didn’t go as well as we hoped since five seconds into the test, the top layer fell and came apart, but it was an easy fix.

Teamwork was an essential part of the process, we couldn’t all do the same thing, otherwise it would take much longer than it could to do anything. So what we did was we assigned everyone a job to do to help speed the process up and get the job done. Saskia has amazing drawing skills, so we gave her a few ideas, and she drew the first design. Anna was good at organization and management, so she made sure we stayed on task, and that we were building the right things, she cut up the spaghetti to the exact measurements and made sure we had all the right equipment. I was good at research, so I came up with a few ideas, and inspiration, and I drew the second design and did most of the building.