Building the Tallest Towers Graphing

[pwr2tch]

I am trying to help my third grader do this tower building project. He built several towers increasing in height with the same base as was instructed and tested them with increasing "Displacement" values until each tower fell. I guess my question is how does he show these results on a graph? That's where I am lost and can't help him.

[tdaly]

Hi pwr2tch,

This looks like a fun project. I would suggest making a graph that has the height of the building on the x-axis and the displacement at which the tower fell on the y-axis.

Maybe an example will clarify what I mean.

For example, let's say that I built three buildings: one that was 10 cm tall, one that was 20 cm tall, and one that was 30 cm tall. Let's also say that 10 cm building fell over when the boards were displaced 5 cm, the 20 cm building fell over when the boards were displaced 3 cm, and the 30 cm building fell over when the boards were displaced 1 cm. (I'm making these numbers up--I haven't actually done this experiment, so don't worry if your results are different from these hypothetical ones.)

I would make a data table that looks like this:

Building height (cm) Displacement that knocked over building (cm)
10 5
20 3
30 1

My graph would look like this: https://sites.google.com/view/tallest-tower-graph/home

Post back if you have other questions or need some more information.