Welcome to the Cornerstone Design Challenge! This activity is designed for teams of 4-5 people to partner together to build a paper structure while learning about and working through the design process. The goal for this challenge is to get you to think creatively and solve problems through innovation and collaboration.
1. Define the Problem
You can’t find a solution until you have a clear idea of what the problem is and identify the constraints you must work within. The challenge today involves building a paper tower to support a ping pong ball. The goal is to build the paper structure so that the ping pong ball rests as high up off the table (or floor) as possible.
You will build the structure using only 4 sheets of paper and 24″ of clear tape. The only tools you may use for construction are: one pencil, one ruler and one pair of scissors. You can cut, fold or roll the paper and use tape where you want, but the structure must be completely free standing, paper and tape only, once time is up.
At the end of the construction time allotment, we will measure the distance from the base of the table (or floor) to the bottom of the ping pong ball. The team that builds the tallest structure will earn thousands of brownie points and significant bragging rights.
Don’t start building yet… Keep reading.
2. Collect Information
Now is the time to ask questions, look around and gather data to start giving you inspiration. You should think about solutions that might have been attempted in the past or find working solutions to problems similar to this one. Spend a few minutes asking questions, conducting research and collecting data (formal or informal) from the experiences of others on the design team
3. Brainstorm & Analyze Ideas
Begin to sketch and talk through possibilities so you can start to understand how the information you’ve collected may impact your design. Regardless of the number of people on your team, invite ideas from everyone. Energize your team and drum up a staggering amount of innovative ideas. Once you have a truckload of possibilities, chose some of the best to consider for construction.
4. Build a Prototype
You’ve generated a long list of ideas fo far. Now’s the time to look at them critically and figure out what to discard, what to refine, and what to pursue. Run with your best ideas, create a protoype and see what happens. For this challenge, you’ll need to move quickly. Be willing to stick with a plan while remaining open to new innovations that present themselves along the way.
You have 10 minutes to complete your paper tower structure. Start the timer and begin building! Remember, at the end of the 10 minutes we’ll measure the height of the ping pong ball from the base of your paper structure. How high will your team build?
5. Present & Gather Feedback
Congratulations, you’ve built your first prototype. What worked? What didn’t work? For this challenge, it’s usually pretty obvious what teams were successful or where improvements can be made. By sharing your photo/video to social media in this case, you are presenting your prototype to others to receive insightful comments. You could also seek feedback from other teams at your location. Offer the same to others by seeing what they’ve built and sharing some feedback of your own. You never know: you may learn something new by exploring what others have built.
6. Improve Your Design
The design process is iterative, so there’s an expectation to cycle through these steps multiple times to find the best possible solution. Now that several teams have already worked their way through their first prototypes, collecting more information, brainstorming and analyzing ideas becomes much easier the second time around.
Your team exists inside a larger community of designers and builders. You aren’t the only one with experience in building paper towers. As you prepare to cycle back through step 2: Collect Information and step 3: Brainstorm & Analyze Ideas, carefully consider what worked and didn’t work for other teams as you reflect on your own experience. It’s not cheating; it’s research.
Your team is now ready to loop back and work through the design process again for Prototype #2. The challenge remains the same, as do the limitations on building materials and tool. Same challenge. Same rules. New ideas. Fresh start.
You have another 10 minutes to complete your second paper tower structure. Start the timer and begin building! What will you improve? How much higher can you go?
Once your second protype is complete, your team should have a really good understanding of how to build structures using only paper and tape. Compare your second protoype with the measurements of your first. How much was your team able to improve over time, or did things take a step back? Regardless of physical gains or losses, your team should be seeing more clearly how to build stuctures that are strong and tall.
Obviously, given enough time and attention to detail, a dedicated team could iterate through the design process many more times until they felt confident that their paper tower had reached maximum height and strength. Realizing that this challenge is more about learning how to solve problems and design creative solutions, what might a team learn from building a paper tower? What contriubuted to your success? What did you learn from mistakes?
Once your team is finished with this challenge, spend a few minutes visiting with other teams to learn about their experiences. Your professor may choose to facilitate a class discussion across all the teams. If time allows, watch this TED Talk by Tom Wujec explaining a similar design challenge he created and led. His findings reveal a lot about how we create and work together.
