the process
The year 9 students of ASC were assigned the task of constructing an earthquake-resistant building purely made out of glue tac and spaghetti with a budget of $60, we had the aim of making this building physically strong with limited materials which gave us a realistic view of what earthquake-prone countries face with since most of them suffer through poverty, so this budget and materials gave us a taste of the problems these countries give us.
RULES:
- 1.minimum lenght of 60cm
- budget of $60 for glu tac and spaghetti
- building must last through the earthquake testing stimulation
my group
My group consisted of Jing Quan, Alex and I and the roles of each group member consisted of…..
Jing Quan: Drawing up designs, brainstorming ideas, and research
Alex: designed and created our building and helped with the second prototype design
Me: gathered all costs and measurements, materials and built the actual buildings.
We all had our own individual strengths such as, Jing who had thought of the idea of the structural aspect of our building and Alex giving in ideas of areas that we could improve in, and I, who used steady hands to build the structure and find more efficient ways to build our tower whenever we ran into a problem.
The engineering process
DEFINE: our group used all the gathered information to look at the problems that we would have to face and figured out what we needed to do to fix the given problem
BRAINSTORM: We drew up ideas of what we could use for our building and talked about efficient shapes and structures that get the job done
RESEARCH: We googles ways that engineers used normal shapes and structures to build stable buildings that would mark all the correct criteria for our assessment.
DESIGN: We got all the measurements and made a worthy design, we made two designs with prototypes A & B
PROTOTYPE A: has a traingualr base and structure throughout its whole build, has crossbars gong through in different directions so seismic waves don’t impact in one area, and gets released at the top of the triangular roof
PROTOTYPE B: Also has a triangular foundation but crossbars are not going in different directions but making mini triangular figures inside each section of the building and added length for seismic waves to be released at the top (antenna)
CREATE: we built our designs with the given materials
TEST: we tested our buildings on the earthquake simulator
EVALUATE: from the given results from the testing we saw what needed to be improved and did so.
changes to the process
-Spend more time on research and get a second face to give us feedback ( preferably an engineer) on our building after doing our first and second prototype, this is to get more effective feedback.
– Make these buildings out of real materials that are actually used and applied into daily life to see if it would survive mediocre disasters.
teamwork
Teamwork side things I would say at the start as a group we all started off pretty slack but got to the task, Jing is a very enthusiastic, outgoing person who definitely lifted the spirits up when needed and was given the role as the leader since he was very much interested in the physics behind building a strong structure like this and was handed tasks such as drawing the design and so on, while Alex was a funny and supportive team member who made doing this project very enjoyable, he supported our building and made sure nothing went wrong. At some times Alex and I would slack off and find it tough to focus but Jing always made sure to get our head back in the task ahead of us. By the end of this project, the three of us had definitely gotten closer and got to experience a different side of a normal school assessment.
presentation of our finished project / viewing
In our second prototype (above) you could see that our building was stable at the start from the side to side movements but 6 seconds into the up and down movements our building had tumbled.
in our first prototype, you can see the structure of our building is stable, and not much movement occurs besides the top where the antenna is placed.
final thoughts
In the end I found this assessment a great way to end the year and gave us all a new experience to learn from, this also nurtured my social and teamwork skills and was an overall amazing assessment.
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