The Task

This assessment was about trying to make the best earthquake resistant building out of strands of spaghetti and bluetac. Over a couple of weeks, we needed to answer questions in a stile, build a building made out of spaghetti and bluetac and test it with s waves, p waves and surface waves. Once finished this and the stile we were asked to write a reflection in your ePortfolio which you are reading now. In this project we were only allowed to use 60 dollars and each piece of spaghetti is one dollar and also each blue tac being a dollar. The reason why we were given this project is to help think of possible ideas that could help with buildings in earthquake-prone countries such as Japan or Nepal. Countries like these are in constant danger from earthquakes so to limit destruction and deaths, earthquake resistant buildings are a must.

The Process

The process of making an earthquake resistant building all started with planning the design. Unfortunately, I was away for the first lesson of planning, but I caught up with my group and I got told the plan and the design along. Our original design was to build it tall and not that wide. It was rectangular and had triangles where possible. After reviewing the plan, we started to make prototypes in the lessons that we had. We started off with the original design, but it did not work as it kept twisting and was about to fall over. We then changed the design to have a triangular base and also adding triangles wherever we could. These two changes really helped our design and the outcomes that were seen was that it was more stable and also that it stood up mostly against the tests. Speaking of the tests, once we finished a design, we would get it tested using an earthquake simulator. Once tested we could then go back, and change was needed to be changed. After multiple tests and changes we then finalised our design and got our final test and then we were finished.

Changes and Outcomes

As shown in the previous paragraph, two major changes that were made from the original design and the final design was the change of the base and the addition of more triangles. The first change was the change of the base, going from a square to a triangle. Changing the base to a triangle therefor resulted in the outcome of the whole building being more triangular. This then helped with the stability and how strong the tower was. The second change was the addition of triangles. As we had leftover spaghetti and money, we decided to put this spaghetti as triangles within the structure. Our thought process with this technique was that it would make the building more stable and stronger. After the test I think that it definitely worked.