Design Cycle

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Investigate
Our task is to build a tower, in twenty minutes, out of dried spaghetti and marshmallows, which is able to hold a book for at least ten seconds. We are completing this task in order to learn how to use the design cycle and how to plan ahead in order to create a product. Our competition, as well as our audience, includes the other teams in our class.
We will use sources to help us implement strategies of building as well as create different tower structure designs and give us a visual representation of a stable tower foundation. These sources include an eHow guide, some tips from the British Association for the Advancement of Science, and a blog entry from a spaghetti-tower contest winner.
Our tower requires different materials, such as spaghetti and marshmallows, and it needs to be finished in no more than twenty minutes. The structure also has to be free-standing and hold a book for at least ten seconds in order to move onto the next contest, where, in order to win, it must be the tallest standing tower in the class.
The test to evaluate the final tower will be the contest itself, and hopefully the tower will meet our expectations by staying up under the weight of the book, not taking too long to create, and have a considerable height advantage over the other towers in the class.

Design
One design that we discussed consists of a tower with a rectangular base, two layers of rectangular prisms atop that base, and a pentagonal prism on the top of the structure. This design would provide the necessary support at the base and is also easy to make in twenty minutes. However, it would be lacking in height if we were to make it to the second round of the contest. Nonetheless, this design is self-standing, strong enough ...

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...e sources, since the only source with pictures was the blog entry. However, our group did quite well in the “Design” section and came up with some creative and innovative designs. Our “Plan” section should have been more thorough, since we ended up making many modifications in the “Create” section, which we completed in an average fashion; even though our tower broke, we managed to create something very complex in only twenty minutes.
Our individual performances could have been improved by taking more time and being more careful with the construction of the shapes, as well as thinking our plan out beforehand so we would know exactly which strategies would work. This project has furthered us as learners by teaching us to plan ahead and design different prototypes, create a successful product using sources, and use the design cycle to guide us in our future projects.

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