Tower of Straws - Lexie

My process for Tower of Straws

            I loved this activity!  The only thing that I found was that I wanted more time and I wanted to know if I got a good tower!  My competitive side came out, which was pretty funny.

            To start, I decided to make a basket to hold my marbles.  I only made it big enough to hold the 7 marbles.  If I new we could make it bigger to hold more, I might have tried that.  I made it by laying to pieces of marbles parallel and taped them about 1 inch apart, trying to make a hammock.  Once I had the basket made, I attached 4 small straws to see if it would stand up. 

            After I got the first tower to stand up, I decided to add more straws by inserting the straws into the base of the 4 initial straws.  When I added these additional straws, I saw that it was not stable, so I add perpendicular bars on opposite sides of my tower (only two sides) and the same idea lower on the structure, on the 2 sides that didn't have the perpendicular bars.

            Because I still had 5 more minutes, I added another set of straws!  It was a rush against the clock, but I was able to add the needed support to make it stand!  My final height from base to the bottom of the marbles was 17.5 inches and I was able to hold all 7 marbles.  

Score Calculation:   13(17.5 - 5)^7  My final score was 619,888,305.7!  That is huge!  I was super happy.

I didn't really do my failure analysis because my tower didn't fail.  I'm sure if I tried to add more marbles, it wouldn't work because the basket I made would only hold a couple more marbles.  If I had more time and made it taller, I am sure that it would have needed more supports, but for what I did it was fine.

If I were to do this activity again, I probably would have measured the straws more accurately and tried to tape them in the same location.  Towards the end I got better at taping the straws together, because I was ripping the tape in half so that I had long skinny pieces, which made it easier to secure the straws.  Next time I would also get rid of the curved parts of the straws, that would probably help with the stability too.