How High Can You Go?

Challenge: To build the tallest structure you could possibly make out of newspaper and tape, in only 20 minutes.

Check out our
beauty of a structure :)

After endless hours (more like a few minutes) of planning the design and structural form of the building, my group came to the final decision that this wasn't going to be easy.

Looking around, we saw that some groups had already begun building right away and others were still planning. The main shape that was common among all groups was the triangle. Previously knowing that triangles are the strongest shape, as a group we agreed on using it for maximum strudiness of our structure. We divided the work, leaving the base arrangment up to me and the height up to my group members. Going with the idea of a triangular base, we began unsuccessfully rolling the flimsy newspaper into cone shapes. Immediately it was evident that a strong triangular shape wasn't going to magically be made from the newspaper. Since there was no other shape in mind that could have been a base and with such short allotted time we decided to just stick with a weak cone shape foudation. A weak base is better than no base  ... right?

As for the increasing body and height of the structure, we came up with the idea of rolling each newspaper into a cylinder and as the height increases the diameter of the cylinder would decrease. This idea is similar to the "Nested Doll Principle" or "Matryoshka Principle".

Do you know those wooden Russian dolls that when you seperate the first doll, it reveals another doll smaller than the one before, which has another doll inside her and so on? Yeah, those are adorable. (: Anyways, our building was similar to that as the cylinders kept on decreasing in diameter and and had one cylinder inside another. This way the mass of the structure would be more balanced with more weight at the bottom and less on the top.

Rushing to finish our structure and admiring the fact it actually stood still by itself,
it was promptly punched down by  Mr. Chung. Thanks a lot.

Overall, I enjoyed this challenge because I LOVE building things. Of course, I'd rather we'd have more time and better material but that made this challenge more demanding and visionary.