Jez's Blog

On the SMASH Day of the 4th of March, our task to build a tallest possible tower out of clay and toothpicks. We were instructed to draw a sketch of the design for the tower of our own teams, before we started to build our towers. Which was quite an important part of the scientific method because it gave you an idea of what you shall do next before you move on. However, we usually neglected it because we usually thought that we already had an idea of what we shall do in our head; or perhaps, sometimes we just wanted to try and see what happens.

Personally, I think that drawing sketches may be important, but not quite useful. Our team failed on the task, even though we've drawn a sketch of the design for our tower before we started to built it. Therefore I think sometimes you should just try different things as you move on; well, at least that's what we (my team) did at the end. We changed our original tower design a bit so that it could be built taller without collapsing. The reason of why we changed our design was because that our tower seemed to fall apart when we tried to follow our original design. And so, although we failed the task, we've learned another problem solving skill, which is to think of another solution when the original one was not working. :D