Spaghetti Structures

Our task was to create a structure that would hold 3 plastic balls above the ground, without them touching. The structure had to be made of uncooked spaghetti and glued using a hot glue gun. Above are some sketches I made of how I could do this. I decided to go with the bottom sketch I made as I thought it was interesting looking and innovative. I chose this design as I thought it was decorative looking and it was repetitive so it looked nice from every angle. When building this design, I changed my idea half way through as I realised the sketch I had done would not be able to hold itself up without additional support. Therefore instead of making one plane for all 3 containers, I made a pyramid instead. I preferred this idea as well as it looked nicer and was more practical.

I began by making the containers. I made three, one for each ball. The containers were made from 4 pieces of spaghetti, each one was snapped in half so there wasn't any excess that would easily snap off. This stage was very fiddly, especially with the glue gun and it was difficult to make the container at the right size to hold the ball without it falling out, or the spaghetti snapping. Once I had made three, I glued them together in a pyramid shape, without them touching in the middle. Once I had done this, I balanced a fourth ball on the top of the pyramid to show that it was strong enough to hold more than three. It was important which colours we used in this exercise because we wanted it to be balanced and interesting to look at, especially when we photographed it with the mini tree and figure to make it look like an actual building. 

Once photographed, our next task was to remove the plastic balls, and make our structure able to without a basketball dropping on it, using only 5 sheets of paper. 

Here is a picture of all of the structures we made to contain the plastic balls. As you can see we all came up with very different ideas, but all were able to hold at least 3 balls.

To make my structure able to withstand a basketball, I crumpled up some of the paper and put it inside the structure. This idea would give it tensile strength as it would make it bouncy and the basketball would simply bounce off the surface of the construction. After doing this, I made a tripod out of curled up paper to make it stronger and to protect the outside of the spaghetti structure. I also placed some cushioning underneath, so that the bottom section wouldn't snap under pressure.
This task was also successful as the added paper meant that the structure was able to withstand the basketball being dropped on it. I was very pleased with this result as not many others managed to stay unbroken. From this task, I have learnt how to make a weak structure into a stronger one using just paper, which is also fairly weak by itself. I have learnt that scrunched up paper can create cushioning and that rolled up paper is strong enough to deflect a basketball. It was challenging to make the construction aesthetically pleasing in this part of the task as the paper had lots of dents in it and it was difficult to join the two, therefore the Sellotape became very messy.