Our icebreaker challenge was to make a tower out of spaghetti to hold up a marshmallow.
We only had 18 minutes, and 20 strips to work with alongside tape. Although it didn't
work exactly, we managed to get something that ended up working, without using tape
during the last few minutes.
Above is the final structure we got.
Reflections: The Marshmallow "System" Challenge
Name: Youssef
Final Height: Did Not Measure (Estimated to be around 30 Cm)
1. Hardware Failure
A lot of the spaghetti pieces ended up snapping during the construction, and the tape lost a lot of its
grip and caused a lot of issues.
2. Debugging the Build
One error there was during the construction of the tower was my group. They were
too busy messing around due to there not being any sort of clear roles or leadership to be able to properly analyze what I needed to do to fix and helped cause some issues.
We ended up patching it by making a primitive system where we skewered 4 spaghetti strips into the marshmellow, and set it up as a tri-pod shape to avoid dealing with tape and set it aside to avoid breaking it.
3. The "Marshmallow" Load
We made sure to keep the load on as long as possible frequently to test if it was stable enough to handle the stress, which for around half of the given time we refrained from testing it, but during the second half when we had to quickly change pace and pivot a bit from our original design, we made sure to keep the marshmallow on the bridge.
4. Hardware Upgrade
I would switch the spaghetti for wooden dowels as wooden dowels are more durable than spaghetti, as during our time, over 10 of them broke in half while trying to set up the structure, and wooden dowels would allow for much more durability and a much easier access case.
5. Tech Career Connection
It is important for the “physical” setup to be organized properly to avoid any sort of breakage and issues that may arise, and for everything to be organized to know where everything is in place and that everything inside is actually needed and important to the system.