The design process is sometimes difficult. My partner Antoine and I had to build a paper tower using the design process. When we constructed the tower first we thought of different ideas and sketched them down on paper. We narrowed down our decisions based on stability, shape, structure, and area of the bottom. After that we concluded with two designs, one with a triangular base and the other with a square base. We came up with different pros and cons to both designs. We concluded that a square base would be much more stable and took up the same amount of paper as the triangular one. After we drew everything down on paper we started gathering supplies. We used one sheet of 20lb 8 ½ by 11 printer paper and 50 centimeters of scotch tape. After we got our supplies we began to work on the tower. We folded half-inch wide strips of paper like horseshoes at the bottom. Then, my partner stacked up the strips vertically patching them together with tape. After 6 strips of paper went up, the tower began to bend and then hit the ground. After that we added 4 strips on the sides to keep the tower up right. Two were added diagonally at the bottom and the other two were added on top of each other to support the top. At that point the tower could only hold one more strip of paper at the top. After that it fell over beyond repair.
After it fell over we measured the tower to see how tall we made it. We saw that it reached a height of 1.5. After we measured it we discussed what went wrong, what went well, what else we could have done, and other options in how else we could have handled the project. We discussed that instead adding supports at the last minute as the tower began collapsing; we should start adding supports beforehand when we had two strips of paper standing upright. We also agreed that we should have built the structure to be sturdier.
During the construction, and sketching of the tower, we needed to film the entire thing with a Canon camcorder. We then used a video editing program known as iMovie to edit, speed up, and add titles to, certain parts of the movie. We added several titles and blended together the clips. After that we published the film into and mp4 file and posted it to a media sharing site used by Palm Beach County known as VODcast. After it was posted on VODcast we used the embed code and embedded it into a comment for one of Mr. Goldstein’s blog posts on PBSpaces weblogs. We were able to make a tower taller than anyone else in his 6th period class. However the record for highest tower was over 6 feet tall. Later, Mr. Goldstein introduced us to this school based social networking site. He had us compile our paper tower video and two other videos which were a platform we needed to build and an intro video that introduced ourselves. After that we posted them on pages that we customize on this website called glogs. With the glog we needed to put text describing the videos and some pictures and some more text describing ourselves. After we created our “glog” we took its embed code and used it to post it on Mr. Goldstein’s weblog.
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