Paper Tower Lab

On the first day of STEM class, in Mr. Kuzan's classroom, we were told to make the tallest tower we could out of a single sheet of paper. The purpose of this lab was to design and construct the tallest free standing tower from a single sheet of paper and 30 centimeters of tape. Our materials provided were one sheet of white paper (used for practice), one sheet of colored paper (used for construction), 30 centimeters of plastic tape, and a pair of scissors.

This was the resulting paper tower my partner, Kenneth Horn, and I created.

Our idea was the cut simple strips of paper, progressively getting smaller by two centimeters. We would cut small slits into the top of each strip. The biggest strip would be on the bottom, then the next largest strip would fit into the tallest one, and so on. Sadly, our tower would not stay upright long enough to qualify when we put on the third strip. We could only account for the height of the first two strips together. We then had to record our height, 53.35 centimeters, along with all the other group's towers into a single chart on Mr. Kuzan's board.

Original chart with all recorded data Finished chart used in lab report

The other groups had these heights: Tower HJ was 122.50 cm, @Chrisbrpl was 72 cm, Chipppk's was 64 cm, Jade and Kenny (my group) was 53.35 cm, KM was 40.10 cm, Chest Pants 2.0 was 56.50 cm, MM was 45.50 cm, Jake Christina was 22.50 cm, Sam and Forrest was 66.50 cm, and Hannah and Seda was 55.40 cm. In comparison, everyone's towers seemed around lower heights. Only Tower HJ was able to reach over 100 centimeters and win the contest of who could make the tallest tower.

This project was meant to evaluate us on our skills that are frequently used in the STEM field; such as designing, constructing, analyzing structures, information on basic principles of architecture sciences, sketching, and later writing lab reports.

The Paper Tower Lab was supposed to open us up to new opportunities within the fields of Architecture, Life Science, and Basic Engineering. It connected towards architecture and life science because it opened up how engineering can be applied to the building of towers out of the most simplistic of materials. As it was our first day, this lab was only continued through an analysis in a lab report.