Spaghetti Tower

Our building plan. Pretty fancy, right?

Overview:

Our total was $400 spent, but we had 4 spaghetti sticks left over. We bought 22 sticks (18 used), 8 cm of tape that we traded for marshmallows, then bought 10 cm of tape after. After some hard, strenuous work, we finally built our tower up to approximately 82 centimeters.

Design and group evaluation:

Our design, originally, was flawless. We had the perfect triangular tower and used some math to figure out exactly what we needed. So, we took our materials and got to work. Unfortunately, the tape wouldn't stick very well, so we achieved minimal progress on the first day.

For our second day, we met a new merchant, who decided to let us trade our tape for marshmallows. He took about 7 cm of tape from us (because we had tried to use 1 cm, which got spoiled), and in return gave 7 marshmallows. These were the perfect replacement for our tape, especially for the evil corners of the figure.

Final height and structure.

So, we tried stuff out. our base was going perfectly, and we followed the plans. We were on a roll, and didn't cut our spaghetti sticks, but instead slid them into the marshmallow far enough to seem like a shorter stick.
This is what we ended up with:

Yeah. Not our plan. We looked around, knowing that this base wouldn't be sufficient, and decided to redesign our building. We decided to make the spaghetti stick straight up and use our super solid base.

Well, we built it. The top started freaking out and falling over, so we purchased a lot more tape. This solved the problem, and our tower was invincible. Well, until we smashed it.
The most grand challenge we faced was trying to get the straight up pieces of spaghetti to stay up. Eventually, we bought more tape and taped them to other supports, making it sturdy and long lasting.
If we had the opportunity to redesign our tower, we'd probably make it more fancy. Maybe make it look like an hourglass or something, because, although the base of our tower was cool, our tower looked pretty bad.

Self Evaluation:

While doing this activity, I felt pretty confident. I've done this a bunch of times before, and tried to make it as sturdy as possible originally. During the activity, however, our tower turned out a little different than expected, so I redid the designs in an effort to save time and money.

Our design was really similar to others in the room after we modified it. It seems they tried to copy us, however, most of them couldn't replicate the delicate artwork involved in our tower. 

If I could add another material, it would be duck tape. I liked how the tape looked on our tower, but the painter tape wasn't sticky enough. Duck tape would be a pretty good fix because, of course, duck tape fixes everything.

Our group consisted of two people, so my contribution was large. I helped build the tower, bought some supplies, and calculated the original design. Both of us helped build, take pictures, and calculate the secondary design.