Audrey Gyolai

In our first build we focused on keeping the number of sharp corners to a minimum. We created a hexagonal base and a triangular first and second floor. We changed the shape of the floors to work with the building’s natural tendencies. During our second build we decided that it would be better to keep a simple design and to keep the design easy to make to maximize straw usage and to make sure that we had ample materials to complete our design.

 

Revision and reflection helped our group stay cohesive and on task. instead of simply building a new design, we had a discussion about what parts of the structures were the weakest. I can incorporate those skills into other activities by checking in with team members and by identifying specific problems to fix and to improve on. I can also go through the elements of a project piece by piece with my group to identify weaknesses and to create a cohesive project. This will help improve my future projects by discussing each component with a team before making many final decisions. Challenges that we faced during construction included lack of resources and a group member that disagreed with the rest of the team’s design. We addressed that challenge of not having enough supplies by modifying our design to fit the restraints of our building materials. We also worked with our other team member to compromise on aspects of the design and to talk through which elements we believed were better and why. Our tower handled 1000 g. We faced problems with sharing our videos with our videographer. We ended up uploading the videos to youtube, but our videographer couldn’t download them because our school’s restrictions blocked the uploaded youtube videos. Our videographer ended up using a youtube link download tool to view and download our videos via a shareable link.