Team Members: Alyssa Brown, Vidhi Patel, Ishani Tripathy
Inspiration: Architecture specifically old buildings around the world. How has the colosseum stayed intact for so long?
Goals:
- Teach students about the important mechanisms in play to keep our buildings standing against the elements of the world
- Students should:
- Explore different techniques engineers and architects have employed to keep structures and buildings standing for millennia
- Create stronger and more flexible designs for buildings, and understand better the challenge of making long-lasting, stable structures
Objectives:
- Teach kids that failure is a stepping stone not a roadblock.
- Demonstrate the importance of trial and error.
- How to make a generically sound structure.
Our challenge:
- How to challenge kids of different ages?
- How can we change our project accordingly.
- How do you make shake table? Materials to use?
Design Process:
- Narrowed down which natural disaster to model
- Made large list of building materials/building sites
- Tested all combinations of materials and bases to decide which worked best for our goals
- Went through different iterations to determine material constraints for student testing
- Laser-cut 2 acrylic boxes for the building sites
- Prototyped three models of air cannons
- Prepared building materials and air cannon materials for student testing
Prototypes:
- Several variations of air cannons
- Balloons only
- Plastic on rim of cup
- Balloon taped to cup
- Testing to figure out best building materials for project
- Toothpicks and marshmallows
- Spaghetti and marshmallows
- Thick corrugated cardboard
- Thick cardstock with notches
Parts to project:
What’s in the box:
- 26 cups
- 2 premade air cannons
- 37 balloons
- Ziploc bag of spaghetti
- Ziploc bag of marshmallows
- Toothpicks
- Pre-cut cardboard pieces of various shapes and sizes
- Moon sand
- Pebbles
- 2 laser-cut acrylic building sites
- 5 roles of electrical tape
If you need to replace any of the materials:
- Cups must be paper coffee cups
- The most ideal are Starbucks “tall” size hot drink cups
- Holes must have pre-cut holes in the bottom before kids make the cannons
- Holes are best cut with Exacto knives
- To recut acrylic boxes, use attached DXF files and cut on ⅛ inch acrylic
- Glue together using regular acrylic glue
- Order Moon sand or kinetic sand- about $15 for 3 pounds
What we learned from Testing with 4th Graders:
Design
- Explore structural stability of various materials
- Simplicity & reliability is key
Student Testing
- Improvise to make more challenging
- Limit building materials
- Limit building cross sectional area
- Allow for time to clean up
