Science Engineering challenge

We were challenged to plan, experiment, communicate and effective teamwork to build a structure that can withstand an earthquake within a given budget.

The roles in our group were the following:

• Charlotte: Reporter
• Emma: Speaker
• Pritika: Project Manager
• Sunishka: Equipment Manager

To decide the groups we played on each of our strengths. For example Charlotte is good at updating and reporting the situation so we assigned her the role. Emma is an effective presenter and communicator so naturally we thought it was fitting if she received the role of speaker. That now leaves Pritika and I, we had similar strengths as we are both good at managing and organising so we just chose one of the roles since both of them would fit us.

When presented with the challenge of drawing a sketch with relevant info reviewing we played on each other’s strengths. Since Pritika was good at sketching, we gave her that role of creating a sketch for our building, Emma had information that would be relevant to our building so she also put that on teams. Then Charlotte and I reviewed the work and tweaked things when we saw fit. The work was then compiled and ready to hand in for submission.

Responsibilities for Investigation:

• Question 4: All
• Question 5: All
• Question 6: Pritika, Emma
• Question 7: Sunishka
• Question 10: Sunishka
• Question 11: Emma
• Question 12: Emma

Once the design and research part of the project was completed we then moved on to the building stage. We had to construct the building with spaghetti and blue tack, with a budget of $60 ($! for 10 cm of spaghetti and $1 for gram of blue tack). Once the construction was completed we tested the building we tested whether it would be able to withstand an earthquake with an earthquake simulator. We placed the building on and we thought that it was all good until it reached catastrophic, then the two spaghettis that were keeping the building grounded came out of blue tack. We redesigned and rebuilt to ensure that the same result wasn’t repeated. Thankfully the design proved successful and the building was officially earthquake resistant.

One thing that could be improved to ensure that the engineering process is more efficient is to clearly set plans and deadlines as this would help with the timeline on when to complete things by. This change could drastically reduce the amount of time spent planning and processing, and more time on ensuring the building built with upmost care and precision.