Jez's Blog

Today was a SMASH Day. Our challenge was to build a tower out of 5 pieces of A4 paper and 2 meters of tape. The tower had to be as tall as possible, and it also had to able to hold 15g on top of it.

Our group, Savanna and I, won the challenge. Our tower was 83cm tall, and it was the only one that has successfully hold 15g on top of it. In this challenge, I think the most important skill that we'd used was balancing. At the very beginning of the task, both Savanna and I were only thinking about how to make the base of the tower. It's because that both of us knew that the base of the tower is the most important part of keeping the entire tower steady and balanced.


The tower that we made sort of looked like a plunger. It's base was much wider than the other parts of the tower. The reason why we made the base so wide was because that the larger the area of the base was touching the surface of the table, the more steady and balanced the tower would be.












However, there were also other skills that we've used during the task, which was the 'combining skills'. You might ask: What did you mean by 'combining skills'?? Well.. what I meant was basically the skills of combining different parts of the tower. These skills were also very important because different combining skills could prevent the disconnection of different parts of the tower. For instance, instead of only using tapes to tape every parts of the tower together, we cut a hole and stuck the cylinder of the tower into its base so that they were better connected with each other.

As a result, balancing was certainly important in this challenge. You'd have to keep every parts of the tower balanced, including its base, its body, and its top plane where you put the weights on at the end. Also, the combining skills were anther important thing to consider. You'll need different combining skills to make the tower even more steady while it's balanced.


- http://www.3dnuts.com/tutorials/modeling_plunger.shtml
[Picture of plunger. Copied by Jez Lee. 4th of Nov. 2008]