Representation of project:

In this project, we were required to research, design, and construct an earthquake-resistant building through the use of blue-tac and spaghetti sticks. To make the task more challenging we were given a budget of $60 with each stick of spaghetti costing $1 and each gram of bluetac costing $1. Throughout the project, we had to research different structure ideas to utilise in order to build a sturdy, strong building that will withstand the stimulation of an earthquake, design and create prototypes of buildings based on our research, test our prototypes, and improve on them. This was all to understand how engineers in the real world structure infrastructure in order to withstand, or lessen, the impacts of an earthquake

Overview of the engineering process:

The engineering process included brainstorming to generate new ideas, researching possible solutions to the problem of “How to construct a building that can withstand the effects of an earthquake”, designing prototypes which will be the solution to the problem, creating prototypes, testing our prototype and evaluating what went wrong, and what went right with our construction and lastly going back and finding ways to improve the design. A change that I would make to the process would be to be more aware of the number of spaghetti sticks and blue tac used in the prototype so that when it comes to the final building we don’t have to face the issue of trying to construct a stable tower based on our previous construction. This was a major problem for us as we did not take into consideration our budget while constructing. This is most likely one of the reasons why our tower was not too successful in withstanding the earthquake. Another change that I would make to the process is being able to research ideas in regard to the actual project that we were doing instead of just researching engineering ideas. I believe that this would have been more helpful as some engineering ideas in the real world could not be incorporated into our building. For example, the idea of using earthquake-resistant material such as steel and wood was not useful as the only materials, we could use were spaghetti sticks and blue-tac. Furthermore, it was difficult to find a variety of engineering ideas as most of them revolved around using strong non-renewable resources.

Teamwork and collaboration:

In the project both my partner and I were responsible for brainstorming ideas of how to structure and construct our building, we were also both responsible for researching possible solutions that we could incorporate into our building in order to achieve the goal of constructing a building that can withstand an earthquake. My partner was in charge of illustrating our building and drawing up prototypes. My responsibility was to annotate these drawings and identify the different ideas and structures utilised in our research. Aurora was in charge of keeping track of the number of spaghetti sticks used and I was in charge of keeping track of the number of blue tac used. Both of these jobs could have been performed better as we struggled to make our tower sturdy because we used to much material in the prototype. The strength of my partner and I contributed significantly towards the project as Aurora’s ability to generate ideas quickly and adapt to unexpected problems, and my creative ability and ability to research thorough information helped us create our building. While our building did not perform how we liked it to, the project was a great experience that helped us understand the work of an engineer.