Wednesday Challenges

Try and carry as many pennies as you can with a supplied square of aluminum foil, you can fold, mold, and do some oragami, but you cannot add anything for any reason to your aluminum foil. The boat carrying the most pennies wins.

With our small square of aluminum foil we tried: 1. To have a large surface area 2. Have an equal radius so that the weight can be evenly distributed 3. Have walls so that our tinfoil is a little less maleable and so water doesn't immediately seep in.

We happened to be able to hold 30 pennies, which sadly wasn't the largest amount but I'm not great at folding aluminum foil and we thought we had a leak, so that's my fault. Our boat did happen to allow an even distribution of penny weight.

We tried expanding our surface area and not fold up the sides just make an upside down pyramid boat. We thought that maybe by trying to prevent the break of surface tension and trying to displace more water, would allow us to carry more pennies.

Overall 50 pennies were held by this design although it was very difficult to try and correctly place the pennies in a way that would maintain our boats structure. Since we made folds at all the piece of aluminum foil was incredibly malleable and would try to buckle from the weight of the pennies.

Surface area, and strength of structure played a key role in this challenge, thinking about it now we would probably try to re-enforce our walls a bit and keep some features of the second design.

Scale your tower to the skies, by making a tower out of spaghetti that requires you have a marshmallow on the top. Build it as high as you can to win.

We decided that it would be a good idea to try an build a triangle base, making our design essentially a giant tripod. We spent a little bit too much time on this design but it was going to allow a large height, essentially looking like an eifle tower due to the weight bending the spaghetti sticks inward providing more support to carry the marshmallow on the top.

It was very difficult to build our first design so we thought that it was a good idea to switch to a simpler design to allow the ability to build our design within the next few minutes. Our new design was to just support a tripod like shape with a marshmallow on top. Two spaghetti sticks would be tied together and we would prevent the tripod legs from moving by putting tape around the legs.

Surface area, and strength of structure played a key role in this challenge, thinking about it now we would probably try to re-enforce our walls a bit and keep some features of the second design.

Scale your tower to the skies, by making a tower out of spaghetti that requires you have a marshmallow on the top. Build it as high as you can to win.

After reconsideration of time from the previous challenge, we thought it would be a good idea to start building our tower starting from the top and going down. We built a tripod structure just like the one before and put triangle bases along the way to support the legs

Due to the legs never being the same distance apart we wanted to try something interesing in hopes of supporting the marshmellow on top. We twisted our structure which made each leg support each other and tried to use the string to prevent the top of it from falling. We would have been the tallest structure if we managed to finish in time. Again there is an issue with time, and how long it takes to precariously balance a tower like we were trying to.

By having all sides come to a point it provides support to the structure and makes the structure less wobbly, however if you have all sides come to a point before the top of the tower, it becomes really top heavy making the structure want to continously fall