Last week in physics we were assigned an in-class project. The project was to construct a tower using uncooked spaghetti sticks and painters tape. Marshmallows were later added because the painters tape was hard to use. The challenging part of this project was the tower had to be at least 80cm in height and our group of 3 had a budget of $500.

The first step of building the tower was to come up with a blueprint of what we were going to build, and how much materials we would need for the tower. Our group used 33 sticks and 17 marshmallows/tape. It totaled to 500. Once agreed on a plan we took the blueprint to Mr. L and got it approved. Time to build!

My group and i began building on Thursday. Our first tower failed, it could not stand on its own and it was no where near 80cm. So the first day we were not successful. Friday my group started fresh, above is our plan, we spent $330 on sticks each costing $10 each so we had a total of 33 sticks and we spent $170 on marshmallows, a total of 17 marshmallows. As we were building we realized that our base wasn't sturdy enough so we added supports on each side of the base. it looked something like this. 

This was our final, the towers height stood at 86cm. I was stoked to see that our tower stood up because our design was a little sketchy. If i were to do this again I would definitely make a sturdier base and add more support to the middle of the tower, but I like our idea of adding diagonal support beams to the base of our tower to help stay up. The biggest challenge for our group was getting the tower to stand higher than 80cm. As you can see we just added sticks at the top to get to the goal of 80cm. 

Self Evaluation

I had a good time doing this project it was fun yet challenging at the same time, at times i wanted to give up when something wouldn't work or if a stick broke. But after it didn't work it made me want to find a way that did so that was exciting for me. I didn't get to look at other groups' designs too much but i did get a look at the group next to us and they had a similar base. If i were to do this project i would use superglue because then the sticks would stay together for sure. The tape and marshmallows were effective but superglue would be a lot better. In our group i contributed ti everything the design, handling the expenses of everything and the building, we all helped out with everything.