Brainstorm and Choose
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Brainstorming with MaterialsAfter spending a lot of time on researching, we moved our way over to the real stuff: using materials. We played around with them, jamming sticks into cards, poking holes in the straw tips, and using the wire cutters to make everything perfect. We tried- what felt like- 100 different ways to bend a paper clip. The only problem was the styrofoam board, since we got only one. We tried to experiment everything with the sample materials, in fear of chopping up our own piece of Styrofoam before we found the right place to stick a straw or a toothpick. Everything was slow at first, but we did get some really good ideas out of the brainstorm.
Pre-visualizationsWe captured our first idea by making pre-visualizations on a 3-D building application, showing how we are going to construct the building. In the diagrams, the clear blocks represent the triangles we made out of straws, paperclips, and toothpicks. The blue blocks are the playing cards used to make the floors, and the red blocks represent the pipe cleaners that connect everything. Although this sums up the main idea of our plan, some factors have changed slightly in order to meet the height requirement, maintain balance, and make our building more efficient for the actual building process.
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Choose! Our Final Building Plan
The final building plan we chose is a pyramid style building, but instead of being like a triangle, which is inconvenient for the people inside, we did regular rectangular floors, each added floor becoming smaller and smaller. From our research, we learned that making the walls with triangles attached to each other would help to support the building when force attempts to push it over. We decided do this with small triangles made of straw. Using straw also is backed up by our "swaying buildings" idea, being flexible enough to move with the force. We plan to attach the triangles together with pipe cleaners, and tie in some cards to make floors. In order to attach the building to the base, we plan to hold it together by sticking in skinny possible sticks adjacent to both the exterior walls and interior walls .This holds the building together, and we will wrap playing cards around the sticks to prevent them from uprooting. To see the research we did for this plan, click here.