Submitted by tgg119 on
DIY Science Activities

Spaghetti Tower

Sample Spaghetti Tower made of tape and spaghetti, suspending a triangle at the top.

 

Our Designing the Future camp uses Computer Aided Design (CAD) and 3D printing to show how many everyday objects are made. This activity will show us how 3D printers use something called "Structural Geometry." This allows for building a structure without having to fill in the whole interior of its space. To help you explore this concept more you are going to be making a structure of your own and see how you can use what you learned about structural geometry to improve the design. Materials needed for this week’s activity:

  • Box of Raw Spaghetti (ideally you would want to use spaghetti that is thicker than average)
  • Regular Sized Marshmallow
  • Tape (Masking or Duct tape)

Your goal with this week’s challenge is to build a tower out of the spaghetti and tape with the goal of having the marshmallow on top of the tower as high off of your starting surface as you can get it. For your tower you should try and use the ideas about structural geometry to help you make it stand up. You probably want to do this with another person to prepare tape and hold the tower up. There are a few rules though.

  1. You can only use the listed materials as part of the structure
  2. You have 30 minutes to make your tower
  3. You can use your hands to support it as you are building the tower but it must stand without any help for at least five minutes for your final height.
  4. It can’t be touching anything besides the surface you are building on such as walls or furniture.

When your time is up or you are satisfied with your tower, take a photo of you standing next to it and measure the distance from your building surface to the top of the marshmallow and include that with your picture. If you'd like, send it to outreach@science.psu.edu and we'll put it in our next newsletter!