Build The Tallest Paper Tower

The 2021 competition is over, but you can try this challenge for fun! Can you build a tower out of just paper and tape? How tall can your tower be and still be strong enough to support a can of food?

Full details, including the building, testing, and scoring procedures, can be found in these four formats:

• Tallest Paper Tower Instructions for Students
• Elementary School Tallest Paper Tower Lesson Plan
• Middle School Tallest Paper Tower Lesson Plan
• High School Tallest Paper Tower Lesson Plan

Congratulations to all Participants

The 2021 Science Buddies Engineering Challenge, sponsored by Fluor Corporation, was one for the record books! More than 6100 students, the highest number to-date, from 20 countries participated. Students competed to build the tallest possible paper tower that could support a can of food for at least a minute. With the Covid-19 pandemic as the background we were impressed to see how the students embraced the challenge and the circumstances and built an amazing diversity of towers from their homes and socially distanced classrooms. Equipped with just thirty sheets of paper and a roll of tape, kindergarteners through seniors in high school built impressive structures by rolling, folding, taping, and twisting. Ranging from a few centimeters tall to over three meters high it was awesome to see the creativity, perseverance, and problem solving that the students put into their paper towers. Figured 1 shows a small sample of the more than 3500 paper towers built during the competition. Congratulations to all the students who participated; you worked hard and we enjoyed seeing all the towers you engineered!

Below we are thrilled to announce:

• Drawing winners
• Top ten highest scorers (all grades)
• Top scores by age

Drawing Winners

All eligible team entries were placed into random prize drawings based on their geographic location. Congratulations to the ten winning teams listed in Table 1 whose names were drawn from the eligible pools! Each of these teams earned $1,000 USD from Fluor Corporation for their school.

Top Ten Scores Overall

The Science Buddies Engineering Challenge was open to students in grades K-12. The top 10 scores, overall, for the 2021 Engineering Challenge are shown in Table 2. All scores were validated by Science Buddies staff based on submission photos and the Challenge rules. Regardless of score, all entries that met the geographic requirements were entered in the random drawings.

Top Scores by Age

To recognize the hard work students did creating and testing their solutions and to give students a better sense of how their solutions and scores compare to other students of similar age, the tables and graphs below show the top scores and score distribution for submissions from ages up to age 10, 11-14, and 15-18. (Note: The age used for each team is the average age of all members on the team.)