Fettuccine Film By Colby Herd, Rachel Casey and Jake Postle

Do you suffer from shortened spaghetti? Are you tired of losing your linguine? Is your fettuccine fragmenting? If you have answered yes to any of these questions, take notes of the following.

Aim Determine if it is more efficient to snap pasta close to the middle or on the outer extremities. Hypothesis We hypothesise that it will be more efficient to snap the fettuccine closer to the middle, as there is less room for variables in the make-up the pasta resulting in a cleaner break.

What is meant by the term efficient? We infer the meaning of ‘efficient’ in this context to mean where the pasta is snapped as close to half as possible, with preferably little or no smaller pieces (generally speaking, smaller pieces are the pieces between Q1 and the minimum height which are deemed to small to be feasible) left over. These left overs are the outliers of the set of data.

Equipment  Linguine pasta.  Ruler.  Tape.  Plastic snap-lock bags.  Computers to tabulate sets of data sets.

Method  Arrange fettuccine in groups of 10, 20 and 30 strands of pasta, then tape these groups together into individual bundles.  Snap these groups of pasta at three different points. Close to the centre, hands on the far extremities of the pasta and finally hands in the area between the two points previously listed.  Once disjointed, arrange in ascending order and tabulate data.

Our Fettuccine Film

Conclusion From what we deem to be a fair test, we conclude that it is more efficient to snap groups of pasta in groups of approximately 30 and close to the middle, as this ‘1 2’ combination minimises non feasible bits of pasta and most of the pasta is snapped in half. Most of the data is grouped between the largest strand of pasta and Q3, with a gargantuan drop off after this.