29 Toothpick Structure

The purpose of this project was to build a toothpick structure that can carry the most weight.

The directions were that only white clue and 29 toothpicks could be used to build a structure that can hold and balance a series of books. Three trials had to be done before creating the final design. When preforming the trials, there were two types of books we could test with, the light books (World Cultures) and the heavy books (World History). We used the heavy books, keep that in mind.

In the first trial, my team mate and I decided that we would create a structure that was trial shaped. We created a triangle and stacked the toothpicks on top of each other. The toothpicks did not intersect at the ends. The structure ended up holding 9 books. The triangle started failing because the walls began to crash inwards.

For our second trial, since the sides of our first structure collapsed, we though that if we intersect the toothpicks at the ends, we would not have the same issue. We were wrong, the building turned out worse than the first, it only held 5 books. We were proven wrong. We learnt that the intersections were the weakest parts of the structure because they smushed under pressure.

The third trial did not go as planned. We created a similar structure as the structure from the second trial. Except this time, we put the intersections further towards the center of the triangle. Logically, it should have worked better than the previous structure, but it did not. It held four books. One book less. Once again, the issue seemed to be the joints.

For the final structure, we went back to our first trial structure because it's preformance was the best out of all of them. Since the joints were the weakest parts in trial 2 and 3, we got rid of the joints. The structure held 9.5 books. The joints were fine, since there were none, but the sides collapsed just like in the first trial. We knew it was coming but we made the same mistake anyway. We should have made supports for the walls so they would not have collapsed as quickly.

This is the struture we built for the final test. It's similar to the first structure we built.

This is what happend to the structure after we put too much weight onto it.

To make the structure even stronger, I would add supports to the walls so they would not crash as easily. I learnt that joints are very weak and that in order to make them stronger, you need to put the joints further to the center. Working on a longer project, I learnt that it takes a lot of patience and time to work on a project like this. You have to think about what you will do if your structure fails, and how you will overcome that issue. I am excited to work on similar projects later on.