Encourage kids to think like engineers with this fun science project, which requires no specialist materials - just spaghetti and marshmallows!
Watch the video above to see Aoife McLysaght and her two children, eight-year-old Alice and Lorenzo, 10, demonstrate how you can easily build tall towers using just these two foods.
"It might not look like the smartest thing to do, to let your children make this kind of mess in the kitchen," says Aoife. "But we've had loads of fun today building with marshmallows and spaghetti so from my point of view it's completely been worth it.
"You probably have building toys like Lego, but we decided to use spaghetti and marshmallows today because in some ways the challenges you face working with these materials are more like the challenges real engineers face.
"It's also been huge fun for me to watch my own children discover for themselves the kind of shapes that work well for building and the kinds that don't."
Challenge children to use marshmallows to join lengths of spaghetti together to make the tallest tower possible. Let them experiment with making different shapes to see what type of structure will be the strongest.
As an added bonus at the end of a hard day's building work you can eat any left over building materials!
Download a helpful spaghetti towers fact sheet here.