The point of this project was to find what shape tower, a square or an octagon, can withstand the most weight. My hypothesis was that an octagon-shaped tower will be stronger because an octagon has more sides. Two towers, a square and an octagon were built using jumbo plastic drinking straws. Each tower was the same area and had the same height.

The results showed that my hypothesis is right. The octagon-shaped tower supported 75% more weight than the square-shaped tower. In addition, the octagon tower had one third of the damage that the square tower had. The results show that the octagon tower can support 3.5 pounds while the square tower could only support 2 pounds. The square tower had 28 (13.2%) broken straws while the octagon tower had nine (4.1%) broken straws.

Future research should repeat this experiment to confirm these results. Future experiments should also include making stronger towers by using diagonal straws to connect walls to the backbone at every other floor. This would give the towers and backbones more support. In addition, for further experiment, would be to use diagonal supports on the walls of the towers. These supports would strengthen the walls.

Other future experiments could consist of testing the strength of different shaped towers such as triangles, hexagons and rectangles.

In conclusion, the an octagon-shaped tower, can hold more weight than the square-shaped tower.