Box The Ball

The first drawing at the top was how I first thought the net should look like. This net wouldn't have worked because there would be no tabs attaching the sides so there would be gaps along all the sides. I also drew an extra tab on the top of the net which wouldn't be needed because the one opposite would be enough to join it. The bottom drawing is the correct net because the tabs on the side would all slot in together holding it securely and the tab at the top is the one that would be glued down. The reason for only glueing one tab is because making glue is bad for the environment so its best to use as little as possible, plus any cardboard that is recycled needs to be glue free. The workings out at the top show how I worked out the circumference of the circle and then the diameter to find out how wide my box needed to be. I got 50.9 and rounded it to 51 to make it easier to measure out then added on 3 mm to allow room for the ball. When doing this I didnt realise that this was adding 3mm to each side and when making I learnt that this was a little too big so in the future I will have to make sure to take into account that each side gets the extra mm instead of just one.

This was my first attempt at the box. It didnt hold together very well and the top and bottom kept popping out. I learnt that this was because I had made the tabs too small and the angles too big leaving too much of a gap when the tabs fold into each other so that they had nothing to grip to.

For my second box I tried to put less of an angle on the tabs and make the slightly bigger after learning with my first box that this would help them grip together. This box still didnt stay in place and again the top and bottom popped out and although I had given the tabs less of an angle and made them bigger this wasn't enough. From this I learned that the angle needs to be tiny to get the tabs to grip and they need to be even longer.

For my final box I made the tabs longer and the angles much smaller and it probably would have held together except I forgot to add the tabs at the sides of the longest edge as shown in my net plan and doing this meant it had no grip at all on those sides so had big gaps when I tried to put it together.

If I had been able to make a final cube I learned that the way to make it work would be to decrease the length of the sides of the squares by 1-2mm so that there was not so much empty space around the ball, to have longer tabs especially where the top and bottom sides open, and to have really tiny angles on the sides of the tabs so that the touch when the box is closed and can grip together and also to round the edges of the top and bottom sides to help them stay in place better and go in smoothly.