A team-building exercise to teach and develop collaboration, innovation, and creativity.
The CHALLENGE:
Build the tallest free-standing structure using no more than 20 sticks of spaghetti, one yard of tape, one yard of string, and one marshmallow. The marshmallow must be on top, and the structure has to stand firmly on its own.
The CONCLUSION:
Comparing each team’s structure, we concluded that some shapes are stronger than others. However, we discovered that even inferior materials like dry spaghetti could be made stronger with design techniques that distributed the mass.
The students gained essential insights into the importance of teamwork and failure concerning science and engineering.
We then compared each team’s design and critiqued how some models are stronger than others. We reviewed why engineers consider tension and compression forces when designing a building or structure.
Our lab encourages a design mindset and supports engineering principles.