Before I start the following had to be clarified:
1. The building was made of pasta
2. The Earthquake was us banging the table
Now that that is out of the way, the problem. We were tasked with designing and making a building that could resist the strongest of earthquakes. The materials we were given were spaghetti and blu-tac to make our model. The base of the building was restricted to 30 cm2 and had to reach 60 cm in height. When those conditions were satisfied, we would be able to place the model on a special table, designed for to simulate a likeness to a real earthquake to see if it would remain standing. While at first this process seemed as though it would take forever, with the help of a team and effective collaboration, we managed to solve this problem within three weeks. Each team member contributed equally but in their own way. My role was to gather anything the team needed; whether that was more pasta, some extra rulers, or even information from the teacher. In addition to that I was the team’s accountant. Tristan was our team leader. He made sure everyone stayed on task. His empathetic nature meant that he treated us well, which in turn meant we wanted to work well and for him. Rohan was our researcher and key designer. His job was to research pre-existing, earthquake-proof buildings and then design a building based off those. We worked well, even if we disagreed, by being respectful of each other. Our biggest challenge was trying to stay in sync. We often confused about which stage of development we were at. This led to frustration, annoyance and minor anger. Eventually we came to agree on which stage we we were up to and went from there.
While it might look as though making the building was the most important part of this activity, this was not true. The whole of the design thinking process is equally important because each part relies on each other part. The first part was researching. While we had one key researcher, we each did research on different designs and contributed equally. This was important because it let us research a variety of designs which helped us to ideate different buildings. After the research came the prototyping stage. Based on the research, we had an idea to make a building that sort of resembled the Eiffel Tower, so we named it the Eiffel Tower (after we had made it, it was so bad that I renamed it The Leaning Tower of Eiffel). The early design is in the top picture. Our design first changed when we realised that we would run out of money before finishing a quarter of the Eiffel design. From there, we thought we were stuck, but rather than give up, we went on and continued researching. (We went back to the research phase.) We eventually chose to change to an Empire State building design, with a structurally sound interior. We chose this because we wanted the height of the rectangular prism, as well the height and structural integrity of a pyramid. Our final design looked like a rocket. In the middle of the structure, there was a connecting point that held the whole building together. This was important because a rectangular prism by itself wasn’t strong enough. Our new building looked better, used less resources and held through the earthquake. Our teamwork made that possible. By focusing at the task at hand, re-evaluating at every possible point and not giving up, we were able to make an earthquake-proof building.
The outcomes of the task were to make a building that could withstand an earthquake for 10 seconds, at-least 60 cm tall and under $60 worth of resources. We met these goals. To improve we could re-evaluate the structure to minimise cost. We could do this by using less blu-tac at the connection points. We could try and make the building taller by adding the bottom half of a pyramid to the bottom of the building, though it would raise the cost and potentially raise the centre of gravity thus making it easier to fall over. If we made the beams thicker, while it would raise the pricing it would become stronger and thus easier to withstand an earthquake.