Balsa Wood Towers
Throughout both Middle School and High School I competed in Odyssey of the Mind, and later Destination Imagination after my school system decided to switch programs. Both programs focus on applying creative problem solving to one of five or six challenges throughout the course of the year, and presenting that solution in competitions at the Regional, State and International level. In the seven years I participated in these programs my team qualified for, by winning the state competition, Odyssey of the Mind’s World Finals three times (we were only able to attend twice) and Destination Imagination’s Global Finals two times. Six of these years, my team participated in the structure challenge, which generally consisted of building a balsa wood tower approximately 8 inches in height and on the order of 10 grams designed to have the highest strength to weight ratio. My team placed in 11th and 12th out of over 50 teams in our two trips to Global Finals.
Early Structure Design from 8th Grade Year
Multi-columned Structure Being Leveled
In my first year competing in the engineering challenge, my structures weighed 15-18 grams – a range I stayed within throughout my structure building career – and held around 200 pounds. By that point, I was already the most successful structure builder in school history, but I knew I could do better, since other teams were holding as much as 1000-1200 pounds that year at other competitions. Right before the state competition I had a breakthrough, and my structure weight helds skyrocketed up to 495 pounds at the state competition and 610 pounds a few weeks later. The next year, I tried to reproduce my results with limited success, and began to try to understand some of the underlying science. I struggled with many of the concepts because the structures were highly indeterminate, and I had not even formally seen statics yet. I pressed on and found Euler’s buckling equation to guide me towards better engineered designs. But the entire year was a disappointment compared to the one before and I only held more than 400 pounds on a handful of occasions despite building over 20 structures that year. In my freshman year of high school, everything started to lock in, but some limitations in that year’s challenge reduced weight helds across the board, so my 500+ pounds held regularly by the end of the year was the best in the world for a structure of comparable complexity, with the highest weight held for any structure being 810 pounds.
My sophomore year’s challenge did not actually require the structures to hold the most weight, instead weight was removed from the structure while it supported 10 pounds. This year’s challenge was an incredibly interesting engineering task which I had great success with, but it was a diversion from the typical structure challenges that I worked on the rest of my years and did not produce any new designs or techniques. My junior and senior years I hit my stride building structures holding 600-800 pounds on a regular basis and building one of the top 15 structures in the high school division each year at Global Finals. I then returned from Globals after my senior year with the intensions of building one more structure. At this point I had developed the manufacturing processes necessary to regularly create structures which were plumb and had legs within a couple of thousandths of an inch in height, capable of holding over 70% of the maximum strength of the vertical members. This final structure weighed in at 16 grams and supported 990 pounds. Under different conditions – I stacked the weight on the structure by myself that day, so it took me ~15 minutes to load the structure – I am confident that it would have held in excess of 1000 pounds. Breaking into the four digit weight held category was one of my unspoken goals after my first year of competing in the engineering challenge, and that last structure was close enough to make me feel like that task was complete. I had gone from a seventh grader with no mathematical understanding of statics in a town that wasn’t on the map in the structure building world to a world class competitor, virtually single handedly. This will probably stand as one of my favorite personal achievements since it was my first serious exposure to the engineering process, and I was able to achieve a goal I set for myself after working tirelessly toward it for six years.
990 pound holding structure
990 pounds on failed structure