As our final assessment for year 9 science, we were presented with the challenge to design an earthquake proof building with a limited budget and size requirements using spaghetti strands and blu-tack. Over the course of a few weeks my group, Jamie, Thomas, and myself designed, prototyped, budgeted, and completed our building. To say this was without challenges would be untrue, but it turned out not to be as complicated as I had imagined. Walking into this assignment, I pictured a complex and difficult building, with lots of supports and taking a long time to construct. But now, walking out of this challenge one major thing we have learnt is that simple is better, and the most complex structure is many times not the most effective. The end result of our work was a very effective and well-constructed building.
After research, we began with the designing. It took many different proposals, lots of maths, and a whole lot of frustration with the budget for us to result in our final design. But when we did, it was an effective model, within the budget, and following the size requirements.
During the design process, we had many different potential designs, but the design we finally landed on included a base of triangles, then with support beams that ran up the tower with struts along 2 of the beams that would support the building as it went up. Then, to meet height requirements, we would attach a single piece of spaghetti as a “spier” that would push our building to the height requirement. This design was quite effective as the main support was triangles, and according to our research, triangles were the most effective in earthquake proof buildings. The base was also very stable as we planned to blu-tack the building to the board we were building it on which increased the stability of it.
When we began building, we were having some budget issues, then we came up with the idea of trading in our pieces of snapped spaghetti that were unusable for longer pieces we could use. Our teacher fortunately allowed this, as the idea was “entrepreneurial”. So, the budget became less of an issue and we were able to get a good supply of spaghetti and blu-tack with our traded in pieces.
When the building was finally finished and was placed on the shake table, it withstood a decent amount of force, and di not break, however the beams running up the building without the support struts were significantly weakened. So when we redesigned after the first try, we took away some of the unnecessary features of the base and used our trade in system to get more spaghetti to add support struts to the beams without support struts. This significantly strengthen our building, and it withstood a very large amount of force from all directions. Our final product ended up being a building that we believe would be very effective in an earthquake
Our team worked very well together to achieve this amazing result. One of my team members is an aspiring engineer and was very helpful during the designing and building process for all of it. He also had great maths skills, helping us calculate the lengths of pasta we would need and grams of blu-tack we would need. This team member contributed massively towards our final product, as our design probably wouldn’t have been as well calculated without him. The other team member helped a lot in the design process, having lots of ideas and contributing to group discussion with new ideas on how to improve frequently. He also helped with the building of the tower. This group member was important to the team, as if we didn’t have him we mightn’t have had the diversity of ideas to choose from that we did have.
I believe then end result of our building was better than I could have imagined walking into this challenge, but that’s not to say there weren’t faults (although limited) with our engineering process that could have improved our outcome. One thing we could have changed in the engineering process would be to do more research, as we did research but if we had done more we might not have taken so long on making and designing a building. Other than that, I think I building was done very well and I wouldn’t have changed anything about the engineering process.
Overall, I am proud of what my team and I have accomplished on this project, I think we have effectively completed the task in making and earthquake proof building and have worked well together to make that happen.