Seismic Engineering Workshop

Seismic Engineering workshop @ The Tech Museum of Innovation - Ramya Kaja 

TECH challenge:

At the Seismic Engineering workshop 02/07/2015, we had to make popsicle houses that withstands an 3.0 earthquake.

Materials:

We had a few things to make it. About 20 popsicle sticks, a rubber band, a hot glue gun with 2 glue sticks, and rubber pie pan.  We weren’t allowed to have any extra popsicle sticks or glue sticks.

Structure Design and Testing :

We were group of 4 team members and our initial design was cube with a pyramid on top of it. We also had to have a second floor to hold a visitor, Grandma Betty. It was a small little doll that was supposed to stay on the designed building and withstand the earthquake. After we built ours we had to test it. We tested it by putting it into the rubber pie pan and the Tech Challenge helper put all the pans on a big machine. She turned on the machine and it made a big earthquake to the pans, then we were allowed to improve them to test it again.

Learnings:

Our mistake was that we put too much weight on the second floor to make sure Grandma Betty wouldn’t come off and the whole building fell down. So we learned never to put too much weight on the top floor especially because that could cause a major disaster in real life too.