Mohammed Jazara's Science Notebook

Making a spaghetti tower is harder than it looks. We used many steps to keep our tower stable and strong. My team, Nada and Mona, and I used these steps to keep this tower stable. First we made a strong base that consists of many spaghetti pieces. Then we made “x” shaped figures on the side of the tower. After that, we started building up making the begging of the second have an x-shape too. The sides consisted of x-shapes too. Then we had a pole-like line that went threw the tower.

 

Why do we do what we do? We do so because we believe that this tower will be as earthquake resistible as possible. Mona, Nada and I put x-shaped figures on the sides because this stops the tower from leaning. We were provided clay to stick them on together and the rest was for us to think of. We had to have our tower at least 35cm tall. While there is an earthquake we had to put two blocks, one over 20 cm and the other over 35cm. We faced the difficulty of having the sticks fall out of the clay, but after thinking more we got to an answer, which is to put a stick, that is perfect length. Once we have figured out that, it affected the whole tower because if we didn’t have the perfect length that tower would lean.

 

This project needed research and of what I researched, I saw a young boy who made a tower on the same concept but with toothpicks and marshmallows. He aded boxes on the side of the tower because this prevents the tower to lean to the side and crash. He was very creative and we need creativity. This helped us think outside the box and this was very helpful. We also used our classmates as resources. 

 

Spaghetti towers were fun, difficult, intense, competitive and best of all educational. This tower showed us how earthquakes are resisted best. Many, like me, thought that this would be easy but it is harder than it looks and sounds. This was one of the best projects we had in Science.