This was our last assessment for science this year.
In the real world
When an earthquake strikes, as it did in Nepal in 2015, buildings are often damaged or destroyed. Many people can be injured or killed by falling rubble. Many others are made homeless. It can take a long time to rebuild their homes after the disaster.
Two years after the Nepal earthquake, less than 5% of the destroyed houses had been rebuilt. That means that 800,000 families were still forced to live in temporary shelters.
Design Brief
We had to design a building that would withstand a major earthquake. We needed to design, build and test a small scale model out of using on spaghetti and blu-tack that met the criteria of quick and easy to assemble, has a minimum height of 60cm, has a maximum base of 30cm by 30cm, has a flat platform on the top level of at least 5cm by 5cm, remains standing after an earthquake, is constructed from the materials supplied by your teacher and costs less than $60 to build, given the material costs.
We are hoping to build a building that can withstand earthquake waves such as P waves, S waves and surface waves. It is not allowed to be held by a person and needs to hold its shape when shaken on the shake table.
50 Minute Design Sprint
We had to do a 50 minute design sprint where we had to build and test a prototype without doing any research or planning beforehand. Our building had to meet all of the requirements that are in the design brief.
When my group and I first got given the task we didn’t know what to do so we tried do build a long rectangle that had double spaghetti on some of the sides for extra strength. We had a building up but at the last second the entire thing got knocked over.
Our group effectiveness and collaboration was good as we got a building up in the first 20minutes and it met the height requirement but in the end, we met zero of the requirements as the whole building collapsed. Our building was under the cost requirements by $10 on this prototype. This at least gave us hope that we can make our next building stronger.
Research, Planning and Prototyping
These are our prototypes that we drew before we did our second building. Our main idea was doing something to do with triangles as they are the strongest shape. We did a couple of different designs basing our idea of this but we decided that none of these ideas were very not very real as they would be hard to build and not very strong. We then chose some design features we were going to use in our next building.
A design feature we chose is crossing in the middle of the rectangular prism. We did this for extra structure and strength and if the spaghetti started to wobble on the shake board, it would have extra spaghetti helping to stabilize it. We also put extra other bits of spaghetti on the bottom sides to help stabilize it if it starts to tip. We chose not to use any triangles even though they are quite strong because we feel as if it is hard to keep a triangle together and that it will just fall apart, especially during the surface waves.
Building 2 and Testing
During our building stage 2, everything went quite smoothly and we finished building our structure in 25 minutes. During testing, our building had no parts come off so, we decided to just do as many P wave, S wave and surface waves until destruction. Our building didn’t fully collapse so we ended up turning it upside down and it stayed, so we just broke it with our fingers.
Conclusion
In conclusion, I think that my group and I worked very well together and had a huge difference from our first prototype compared to our finished building. Our second building took a lot shorter time to build and met all of the requirements. If I were to do this again, I would probably focus more when doing the first prototype so we could truly see what would work or not for our second design but, other than that I wouldn’t change a thing as I think that our building did very well and we all knew what we were doing.