in this project we had to build a earthquake resistant tower made out of only bluetak and spaghetti, it had to reach certain measurement requirements (such as being 60cm tall), then it needed to pass a shake test. our tower needed to be strong enough to withstand 10 seconds on a shaking platform, after that 50 gram weights were placed on the structure to see how many it could stand without falling over or breaking.

overall my group’s spaghetti tower was better than I expected, it passes the shake test easily and held 150 grams of weight before it fell through the middle.

to create our structure, we firstly had to decide on our materials which wouldn’t exceed the budget of $60 ($1 for bluetak, $1 for spaghetti).

we then made our first structure, this structure came out really well, as it passed our practice shake test. the only thing was that it was under the required height, which meant we needed to re-think how we would make it.

this was our final structure, we decided to add a bit of height to the middle part. overall this tower was pretty sturdy, but after the weights got added to the top, the bottom pieces of spaghetti started to collapse.

one thing I would change is that we ended up having left over bluetak, so we could have split the bottom section into 2 parts, as if the spaghetti was shorter it would be less flimsy and be able to hold more weight.

my group consisted of: Poppy (project manager and reporter), Asha (equipment manager), and Caitlyn (speaker). we chose these roles as the suited us the most. I think that my group worked very well together and created a good earthquake resistant structure.