When I brought out the spaghetti and marshmallows I think my children thought we were having some kind of weird and wonderful ( to them ) dinner, not building structures.
This is a great activity for children of most ages as you can tailor it to their understanding. I let my 2 year old just build whatever she wanted, and she had a great time working out how to put the spaghetti in the right places. With my 4 year old we were a bit more structured and tried to build a tower.
What you need
Spaghetti ( uncooked! )
Marshmallows
What to do
Snap the spaghetti into smaller pieces.
Push the ends of the spaghetti into the marshmallows to build different shapes for your tower.
We started with a cube but when we put weight (Pooh bear in our case) on, it started to lean very precariously to the right and one of the spaghetti vertical pieces snapped. We then discussed what we would do to make it stronger. We decided to add some diagonal pieces which seemed to do the trick.
We thought it would then be quite good fun to mess about trying lots of different shapes and see if we could break them. Straight lines and marshmallow corners tend to lead pretty much to triangles but we had a lot of fun with other shapes too.
The Science Bit
Cubes tend to make stable structures, especially if they have diagonal pieces to strengthen the sides.
Can you show us some structures you have made?
Kelly
March 15, 2012 at 8:18 amMy son would also think spaghetti and marshmellows would make a great dinner!
Laura @ You, me & the mindee's
March 15, 2012 at 9:32 amLooks great fun, my 2yo would love this. Will definitely be trying it out x
Actually Mummy...
March 15, 2012 at 9:43 amGG and her class did this not long ago. The marshmallows looked a bit grubby by the time they were finished, and gradually the structures were missing bits! I hate to think what got consumed in the end!
maryanne @ mama smiles
March 15, 2012 at 10:36 amMy kids love doing this, although we’ve always used toothpicks instead of pasta. Love the extra challenge pasta adds!
sunnymama
March 15, 2012 at 11:01 amThis looks fun! 🙂
Susan Case
March 15, 2012 at 12:09 pmWonderful idea on the marshmallows!
ScienceSparks
March 16, 2012 at 2:38 pmThank you
Shiloh
March 15, 2012 at 5:18 pmWhat a fun experiment! Were the marshmallows fresh? How many did you guys eat in the process? That would be my biggest problem.:)
ScienceSparks
March 16, 2012 at 2:38 pmthey were fresh, but older might work better? We ate uhm…several 🙂
@BlueBearWood
March 15, 2012 at 8:12 pmGreat fun. I’d have to buy 4 times the amount. 1 to build and 3 for the girls to eat!!
ScienceSparks
March 16, 2012 at 2:38 pmha ha, we did go through a lot!
RockerMom
March 16, 2012 at 1:26 pmWe did this a few weeks ago. We used mini marshmallows and toothpicks. The large marshmallows seem like they’d work better and the variations in possible lengths of the spaghetti would lead to more possibilities. Thanks for sharing!!
Angela
March 16, 2012 at 5:12 pmMy kindergarten did this a few weeks ago with toothpicks and marshmallows. The structure she made was so amazing! And she had a great time doing it too. I was delighted to receive a full explanation of how the structure she made works and how she added supports in different places to make it strong!
Jamie H
March 17, 2012 at 4:34 pmLooks like fun! Knowing my girls though, they’d try to eat everything (including the raw spaghetti) before they actually made anything!
Ticia
March 22, 2012 at 8:48 pmWe did this before with toothpicks, but the extra challenge of pasta is kind of intriguing.
Thanks for linking to Science Sunday!
Carrie
March 23, 2012 at 1:09 amOh, how fun!! Reminds me of my days teaching geometry. Thank you for sharing at Sharing Saturday!!