Our Year 9 classes in Science have wrapped their look into plate tectonics with an engineering challenge: design, build, and test a spaghetti skyscraper which can survive a simulated earthquake (using a shaker table). Limited by size and cost restrictions, they came up with some interesting features and elements, including an Eiffel tower look-alike, some sneaky braces, and a lot of triangles for strength. 

Some disqualifications based on non-conformance to the rules left half a dozen to fight it out. No clear winner was identified, as they all survived our earthquake simulator, which shook itself apart not once but twice. Perhaps the next challenge should be to build a better quake simulator.