Lets Give It A Try Building Toothpick Towers

Let’s Give It A Try! Building Toothpick Towers

Building Toothpick Towers ® Build the tallest Tower that can hold a book for at least 5 seconds. ® Materials Tooth picks ® Modeling clay ® Ruler ® Wax paper (for desk coverage) ®

Building Toothpick Towers: Round 1 ® Form Teams of 3 or 4 persons ® Draw your idea on paper (5 min) ® Build it with team (10 min) ® Test your tower (2 min) ® Continuous Improvement (Build it again – only better!)

Building Toothpick Towers: Round 1: Within-team discussion ® Take a few minutes to talk with your team: ® What worked within your team? ® What didn’t work for your team? ® Do you think that if you had another try at this you could use your learnings and make a better tower?

Design Considerations ® Tallest tower ® Strongest and Tallest

Lets take a few minutes and try to get some ideas from other structures…. Can they improve our Toothpick Towers?

Great Pyramid of Giza ®Built 2560 BC ®Tallest man-made structure for over 3, 800 years

Eiffel Tower in Paris, France ®It took two years to build. ® 81 stories high building. ®Fifty engineers and designers produced 5, 300 drawings to make tower

Bridges ® Can you see something similar to the previous examples? ® Triangles inherently strong

Building Toothpick Towers: Round 2 ® Draw your idea on paper (5 min) ® Build it with team (8 min) ® Test your tower (2 min) ® Continuous Improvement (Build it again – only better!)

Building Toothpick Towers: Round 2: Within-team discussion ® Lets discuss your experiences ® What worked within your team? ® What didn’t work for your team? ® Lets review how this exercise is an example of scientific inquiry

Building Toothpick Towers: Round 2: Between-team discussion ® Lets see if other teams had the same thoughts about their approaches to building the marshmallow tower ® What worked within your team? ® What didn’t work for your team? ® Do you think that if you had another try at this you could use your learnings and make a better tower?

MARSHMALLOW TOWER Food for Thought 1. How high did building your marshmallow tower go? Measure it with your ruler to find out high you built or put your structure to the test by putting the preselected mass test units on top of it to see if it will support them. 2. What shapes did you make with your marshmallows and spaghetti to create a sturdy tower? 3. What could you do to build a higher/stronger marshmallow tower? What would happen if you used different sized marshmallows? How about if you built a wider base or narrower base? 4. Be sure to predict what you think is going to happen. Then test your question. Are marshmallows good building materials? What other materials can you use to build a tower? Try building a tower using clay and straws or toothpicks and peas.

Other Curriculum Ideas Math lesson-calculate costs, measurement Social Studies-Architecture in different regions/parts of the world ELA-journaling, story writing Research-structures

Questions?