During Term 4 science, this year we had the challenge of making a tower out of spaghetti and blue tack. The criteria that we had to follow was, the tower had to be a minimum of 60cm tall, and fits within a 30x30cm base. We have $60 to spend and the cost of the materials was $1 per 10cm of spaghetti and $1 per 1g of blue tack. We were given this challenge in teams of 3 (Simba, Mitchell and I). The challenge was to build an earthquake-resistant building using the materials provided. We were given 3 weeks to plan, design and build our 2 prototypes.

For our engineering challenge, we built 2 prototypes. The first one was very successful and could withstand the earthquake simulator, our first prototype was 61cm tall and had a 15x15cm base. We spent $44.5 on spaghetti and 15.5 on blue tack, which adds up to exactly $60. The simulator moved our structure, left and right, forward and back and up and down for about 30 seconds. Our 1st model was unphased and withstood all the movement. No changes to this model were necessary at all. For prototype 2, unfortunately, we wasted our class time and had to improvise and create a simple and quick design to finish. With very little time left in this challenge we built a very simple structure, it was placed on the simulator for 30 seconds and although it was doing well on the simulator, towards the end it began to tip over. My group could have improved on our time management. Structure 1 was far more successful than structure 2.

The roles of our group in this task were that Simba was responsible for building, the spaghetti structure. Mitchell was away from school and did not contribute to most of the project. My role in the group was to design and plan the buildings. Although we had our roles in the group, Simba and I worked together to complete this task. We looked over many different ideas and chose the most suitable design. Simba was good at building our designs and putting them together. I was happy with the drawings I did. I think my group worked well together on the first prototype. It was so successful that we felt it was hard to beat.