Throughout the past 4 weeks in science, we have been tasked with an engineering project to construct an earthquake-proof tower made of spaghetti and blu-tack in groups of 3. Through this time, we went through a step-to-step process including, defining, researching, designing, creating, testing, evaluating, and sharing our experiences. When creating our tower, we had to keep in mind regulations such as 60cm in height, 30x30cm base (Max), and a keeping costing under $60 (one spaghetti cost $1, same as a gram of blu-tack).
The main purpose of this project is to educate us on how towers constructed today are built to withstand and force of P, S, and Surface waves generated in an earthquake. Furthermore, when we tested our towers we could see how well engineering strategies to earthquake-proof a tower work in a simulation and whether or not the strategy that we implemented would be the best for buildings in our world today.
In this process I am quite happy with how our group designed, create, etc. Even though my group wasn’t entirely successful I was still able to learn what worked and what doesn’t in a real-world situation. Our group had many disruptions with absentees (some of them I’m to blame) however we worked around this still being able to create a masterpiece, that still didn’t meet all regulations. From this experience what I would do differently in the engineering process is research how successful earthquake-proof buildings are constructed and also how buildings in earthquake-dense areas are constructed rather than this as a general topic. This would help me understand on a deeper level, therefore, leading to me further constructing our tower in a better way.
My final evaluation of the project however is that it is very entertaining compared to the basic test and more projects should be made like this one in the future.
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