After the spaghettis tower competition, I gained some experiences. The result is: only one team can hold up three cups of water and the other teams can only hold one cup of water. I was surprised at that the tapes seemed to worke so well at the joints but it also gave weakness to the towers.
The team that holds the most weight is very small from top to bottom. I believe the smaller the structure, the easier to make it symmetrical. Other towers all have bigger structures which make symmetry hard to achieve. The winning team also has tapered spaghetti bunches on the bottom to support the load which I consider a great design. I think the joints of the towers are what made these towers fail to hold more weight beside the symmetry. As I saw the water containers are stacked to the top of the towers, the towers show their limits by tilting to a side or corners. This indicates the weakness of the joints and lack of symmetry. If the whole structure crushed as the water container is put on top, then this will mean the structure is definitely not able to stand that weight.
Our team’s design is to make a structure with two triangles from cut and bunched spaghettis for a top and a bottom and then use three bunched long spaghettis to connect the top and bottom. We use three of these structures to surpass the require height of 24 inches. The triangles we made are about 3 to 3.5 inches on each side. I don’t feel it is too large. However, not all three of the structures are leveled when it is on the table. Even though the top of the tower is leveled, the tower leaned to one side when I tried to put the second container on the top. If all three structures are level, I think we can do better.
I feel our design is harder to achieve symmetry then the winning. We started to build before everyone else did, but still can’t win the competition. The important lesson is: Bigger is not necessary better, and shoot for the key success factor, which is symmetry in this case.
yeah its okay, our group only held two hahaha
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