How Towers Stand
Discover the ingenious engineering that allows towers to soar skyward without toppling. Learn how tall structures balance crushing gravity, tame howling winds, and anchor firmly into the earth.
Like Duolingo, but for How Towers Stand. Tomo turns the whole topic into a game you play five minutes a day, until it actually sticks.
A short one: 12 levels across 2 sections, about 24 minutes end to end, roughly 5 days at five minutes a day. It moves through Standing Tall Against the Elements and The Secrets of Extreme Height. It starts from scratch.
Free forever · No credit card · iPhone & Android
Key ideas in How Towers Stand
- A tower's total weight presses constantly downward due to gravity
- The tower's structural materials must push back upward against compression to avoid squashing down
- If upward structural resistance fails at any point, the tower collapses downward
- A tower concentrates massive downward weight along its base
- Distributing that weight over a wide footprint lowers the pressure on each patch of ground
- Concentrating weight onto a narrow point can cause the soil underneath to sink or fail
- Upper tower levels do not need to support additional stories above them
- Making the top of a tower narrower or lighter reduces unnecessary dead weight
- Lower tower sections only have to carry the reduced weight of the tapered upper sections
- Triangles hold their shape rigidly and channel loads along their beams
- Lattice truss towers can reach extreme heights because they are largely empty air rather than solid mass
- Whether towers stay upright because internal compression matches the downward pull of gravity
- Solid stone towers quickly become too heavy to support their own increasing height
- A tower with a low center of gravity naturally settles back onto its base when nudged
- A high center of gravity means even a slight tilt swings the tower's balance point outside its footprint
- Keeping most of the tower's mass near the ground prevents small tilts from leading to a total topple
You've tried the other tabs
Thirty open tabs. Four facts you actually kept.
You watched. You nodded. By Sunday it was gone.
One answer, then back to scrolling.
Eight weeks. You meant to finish. You didn't.
Tomo gives How Towers Stand the Duolingo treatment: levels, streaks, and quick quizzes that test what you just learned. That game loop is what the tabs above never had, so it's the one you actually finish.
Here's what playing it feels like
A real question from this course. Take your best guess.
To keep from getting squashed under its own weight, what must a tower's materials do?
Get it right to open this lesson and 11 more in the app.
Where How Towers Stand takes you
- 1
Standing Tall Against the Elements
- How Towers Carry Their Weight
- Surviving the Wind and Sway
- 2
The Secrets of Extreme Height
- Rooting Deep Underground
- Skeletons: From Stone to Steel Tubes
2 sections · 4 units · 12 levels. Built to play, not to enroll.
Tomo is in ChatGPT
Tomo is also a ChatGPT plugin: the same playable courses, built and played inside your chat.
Add Tomo to ChatGPT- What to ask
- “Make me a Tomo course on black holes.” “Turn this chat into a Tomo course.”
- What you get
- Quick questions with instant feedback, hearts and stars, ready to play in about a minute.
- Where it goes
- No sign-up to start. Connect your Tomo account and your streak carries on in the app.
You pick the voice
How Towers Stand is taught in the Bestie style: your friend who just gets it. Want a different feel? In the app you can spin up the same topic in any of Tomo's teaching styles. Same facts, totally different vibe.
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Start How Towers Stand today.
Download Tomo, search How Towers Stand, and play your first lesson in under a minute.