As we got into our groups, I was with Aaron Ravi, EJ Tan and Tim Savundra. Our goal was to make a 60cm tall spaghetti and blue tack tower, the base had to be 30 by 30cm maximum, the tower had to survive 3 directions for 10 seconds. We had to spend $60 (fake) to buy the spaghetti and blue tack, 10cm of spaghetti cost $1 and 1g of blue tack was $1.
Our first design was a box tower with a cone on top of our tower, but we realized to make it to 60cm you would need to spend a lot more money and the base would be too unstable since we thought the minimum was 30 by 30cm. I have no evidence we were going to make this since we only talked and drew a sketch which was deleted.
The next lesson we came up with the plan of a square base and a triangle with a big stick in the middle. This is when we figure out the maximum was 30 by 30cm, unfortunately we can not find the sketch of this design too. We started to build our first prototype. as we were building this we realized the spaghetti connecting the square and the tower was weak and break easily. So we started thinking again next lesson.
Next lesson Aaron and I made a bunch of sketches as Tim, EJ were building what we told them to build. We tried many buildings when I saw EJ had built a small triangle based triangle so I thought to build a bigger one over the small one and connect them together. EJ and Tim started to build as Aaron and I were sketching and talking about how long each spaghetti should be.
our building design (not to scale)
Once we had built the prototype we got to test our design. I would put the video but the file is too big. Our first test told us a big flaw we could not get a stable 60cm in height the stick the middle had fallen over, as a team we thought what was wrong, we figured out the second half of the stick was too heavy and the connection of the base and the stick was too light. We knew what we had to do but we ran out of time so we had to do the final design of the day of final testing.
On the final testing day we got time to build, Aaron found out we had lots of money left so we bought extra spaghetti and blue tack. We built our design, we had put more blue tack at the base and less on the middle stick. Again I would put a video but the file is too big. This time we had made a tower 3cm taller but it did not matter since we pass the test with only 1cm lost.
This project was really fun to make, I had fun building and testing. I think our group it very well we came up with a good design and when we had a problem we would see what was wrong and fix the problem.
by Kenneth Kim