Tower Building Challenge

One of our classroom challenges has been to build a self supporting tower using only two pieces of newspaper. To qualify as a success, the tower has to stand up by itself for at least 30 seconds. We had to work in pairs and had a set time to complete the challenge. Some of us got a tad bit creative and added some little extras (like glue!!!). So we decided to have another tower challenge the next day making sure everyone was abiding by the rules. This time we had to build three towers -

Number 1: as per the original instructions

Number 2: as per the original instructions plus glue

Number 3: as per the original instructions plus 1 meter of sticky tape

This challenge was much hard and much better. Our team work was way better and having the three challenges meant we had to do a lot more problem solving. We found the best towers all involved glue, had a wide base and were narrow at the top. All groups managed to get one or two towers to stand up for more than 3o seconds. It turned out that our biggest challenge was recording our results. We were having too much fun! Here are some photos.