In year 9, we had a science project that involved us building a tower made from spaghetti and blu-tac and seeing how it holds up against a simulated earthquake, which was simulated by a table shaking for ten seconds. Each team had a 60 dollar budget. A strand of spaghetti costed one dollar, and a gram of blu-tac also costed one dollar. It had to be at least 60cm high, and the base had to be at least 30×30 cm. Everyone had to form teams of three or four and assign roles to each member.

The engineering process involved a lot of trial and error, with the group going through multiple designs. Our first design as a group involved a large cube with two pyramids in the middle to keep it stable, with a trapezoidal prism on the top. However, we ran into many problems with this design, the main one being how it twisted and turned when left to stand alone. It twisted so much that we couldn’t even build the trapezoidal prism on top. This led us to scrap the design. This time, we used a hexagon for the base instead of a square, as it would be more structurally stable. Two hexagonal prisms were built, one stacked on top of the other. Each of the walls had crossbeams to keep them upright. For the top, we didn’t know what to do, since the building was not 60cm without something so we made what we could with the remaining budget we had. After a first test run with the simulated earthquake, we decided that a trapezoidal prism, like the one in our first, scrapped design, could be built on top with the remaining budget. to the side slightly. In the future, we would probably take some spaghetti out of the crossbeams to reinforce the top.

In our group, Finlay was the project manager, I was the equipment manager and Adam was the speaker. The role of reporter was shared by all of us. We experienced trouble filling the jobs that these roles presented, often having to fill in for each other due to the absence of at least one group member. Eventually, we forgot about the roles and ended up just collaborating as teammates, and not as role-specific individuals. And even then, the strengths of each group member added another perspective to the design process and helped contribute towards our goal.