Newspaper Tower

This is our newspaper tower.

My, Tannya's and Angeline's spirals :]

The materials we could use were 4 sheets of the Toronto Star and maybe a little more than a meter of tape. And we only had 30 minutes.

Ours was probably the fastest made (it took like 10 minutes), and we thought 6 feet would be tall enough...we were wrong. :( Ah well.

Why did we design our newspaper tower this way? 
We originally wanted to make a triangular prism, but decided that a design such as that of a camera tripod would be better and would conserve more newspaper: a tripod doesn't need base supports to stand up. Part of the reason why our design could stand so well no matter where it was moved was that our base was not rigidly supported, so it could adjust to different parts of the floor. Our design was very simple and required very little tape, so we used the rest for extra height (hence the 20 cm-long tape extension on the top that Mr. Chung later squished).

So whole and healthy before it got squished...also note the flag with a :D and spiral that Patrick was so proud of. 

What physics concepts did we apply?
Mainly we applied concepts that I remember learning from grade 7 science (some of the few things I retained from that class) : that triangles are the strongest of all shapes (if we built supports, they would have been triangular) because any forces applied to a point of atriangle are distributed down its sides, making it really good at withstanding pressure. Another concept that everyone applied was that the base of the tower should be bigger/wider than the top, such as that of a pyramid. Structures with bases like these are more stable because the wider base brings the center of gravity of the structure closer to the ground. This makes it less likely to fall over.