Newspaper Tower

I just saw that I had never written about the newspaper project we had on the first day.

This was a pretty straight forward project, the goal here was to make as tall of a structure as possible that would support a cinderblock using only newspaper and masking tape.  I didn’t have any catastrophic learning opportunities here, thankfully.   I chose to use time tested principles and they ended up working well.  I based my design on the cylinder and the triangle which are two of the strongest shapes in engineering.  I counted out each sheet of full sized newspaper and divided them evenly into six stacks; I used an additional stack, plus the extras, to for the core of the structure.  I rolled all seven stacks tight cylindrical shapes and used the masking tape and tightly raped the whole tube. I then took the half sheets of newspaper and folded them into thick straps.  I placed two cylinders at three corners and one larger cylinder in the center.  I attached the tubes together using the newspaper straps and masking tape and there ya have it, one newspaper tower.