Our challenge was to design a building that would withstand a major earthquake. We need to design, build, and test our building made out of only spaghetti and blue tack. 1 spaghetti stick costing $1.00 and one gram of blue tack costing $1.00. We had one trial run and one final run on the earthquake simulator. Our building had to follow the following criteria.

• is quick and easy to assemble
• has a minimum height of 60 cm
• has a maximum base of 30 cm x 30 cm
• remains standing after an earthquake, as simulated by shaking a table for 10 seconds
• is constructed from the materials supplied by your teacher
• costs less than $60 to build, given the material costs listed below

The first thing we did when starting our engineering task was research to come up with designs. When we were happy with our design we decided to start building. Our original design didn’t work whatsoever. It used up way too much money and when attempting to build it kept collapsing and all the pasta kept snapping. We decided to go off our original design and just start building whatever comes to mind and that is how our design was created. When putting our first prototype to the test it withstands the earthquake with no major damage. The only issue was that the pasta on the very top was really wobbly and unstable. All of the joints connecting the bluetack to the pasta were stable which was good, but we use a lot of blue-tack for it. We decided the changes we would make for our second prototype would be to try to use less blue-tack, and the advice given to us by our teacher was to make our base bigger. Our second prototype did withstand the earthquake, but one strand of pasta disconnected from the blue tack, this was because we tried to use too little blue tack but that backfired on use. The bigger base did make out pasta tower more stable because there was more surface area. Our tower did stay up and did reach the 60 cm minimum even after the strand came loose. Overall, I think our design was strong and stable. If I were to do this challenge again, I think I would try to make the tower reach 60 cm without using the strand of vertical pasta to do so I think this would make it more challenging. I would also try to be more careful with the pasta because I did snap several bits.

In our team of 3, we had Emily as the reporter and the speaker, Jorji as the project manager, and me as the equipment manager. Emily’s jobs were a speaker to seek help from the teacher and other class members or outside experts. And as a reporter makes sure that the final presentation is ready by the deadline. Jorji’s role as project manager was to make sure that everyone understands the challenge and keeps the team on track. My role as Equipment manager was to make sure that the materials needed for the task are available and that everyone cleans up after each session. We all had our roles to play but we all helped each other out when needed. In our group, each member had roles when building our pasta tower. Jorji was good at sketching our designs and coming up with ideas. Emily was our researcher and came up with ideas she found on the web and calculated all our costs and how much pasta we will need to make our design. My role was the builder because I could put the pasta and weave the blue tack together to make the joints more stable.  When trying to come up with our design we gave everyone’s thoughts a chance and ago and we all shared our thoughts and ideas.

The capabilities I used when designing and creating our pasta tower were resilience, teamwork, and organization. Resilience was a big part of the project because of how fragile the pasta strands were and how they kept snapping and how the tower would fall over. We thoughts of giving up a few times when everything was not working for us but we keep going and trying to build our building. Teamwork was needed in this task because we all had our roles and responsibilities, and if we didn’t work as a team, we would have made three different models and the project probably wouldn’t have been completed. The organization was important because if we weren’t organised then we wouldn’t have made the timeline of when the stile questions were due.

The engineering process is a sequence of steps that engineers use to help them develop and test potential solutions to challenges. If I could change the engineering process I would have more research time to generate more ideas and have more of an idea of how to build the tower. If there were no $60 limit. If we didn’t have this limit our creations could have been more creative because we would have had more freedom. I really enjoyed this task.