Year 4 - Super spaghetti structures

As part of our ‘Natural Disasters’ topic this week, Year 4 learned about how buildings are designed to withstand earthquakes in areas that are prone to them. From this, we created our own structures that would withstand an earthquake.

To begin with, we considered how to build our structures using the spaghetti, taking into consideration what we had learned so far. One example of what we considered was cross-bracing, where two pieces of spaghetti are placed at diagonals to create an x shape. This provides strength and greater protection from collapse.

We used different materials to hold our structure together, such as plasticine, blu tack and marshmallows. As we built our structures, we compared them with what other children had designed: a lot of our structures consisted of a pyramid structure.

The ultimate test was to test whether our buildings could withstand 10 seconds of movement! The majority of the structures survived this and even if they did not, we had a really enjoyable afternoon applying the knowledge that we had learned to the challenge.