Engineering (Making a Tower)

• Focus Question:

How could you build a tower?
If we have marsh-mellows and noodles how can we make the tallest tower?

• Hypothesis/Prediction:

If we make the marsh mellows as the base and noodles as the beams we could make a tall tower.

• Planning:

-Ask the students questions about towers to make connections to prior knowledge. -Show pictures of different towers and ask the students how towers are made. -Ask the students how we could make a tower from marsh-mellows and noodles. -The students are told to work with their group to make the biggest tower they can with the materials provided.

• Data/Diagram/Graph:

# Of Marsh-mellows	# Of Stripes	What Happened
Made it stick like glue	Beams	Pasta stayed together
We used 16 Marsh-mellows	Supports	It helped it stand tall
More marsh-mellows acted like more support	Used 38 pieces of spaghetti noodles

• Claims and Evidence:

The more support you have at the bottom and building on to each level helps the structure stand erect. The majority of the marsh-mellows should be at the bottom because the weight would be too much on top.

• Conclusion:

Having a model of what is to be built first will help the process in building the real thing. Trail and error  happens when building a model to figure out the best options and resources for the building process.

• Reflections:

How can we strengthen our base if we had more time?