Over the last week, a friend and I had been designing a contraption out of toothpicks and glue.  The project was for my physics class, and the purpose was to design and build some sort of casing around an egg so that when the egg was dropped from roughly two stories, it would survive the impact.  Hence, the name Egg Drop.

Many of the projects survived, including ours.  By projects, however, I mean the contraptions that we built, heh.  I cannot say the same about the eggs inside, however.  A majority of them broke including ours (darn).

What was great about our project, though, was that it actually would have worked (that's what everyone said after they witnessed their eggs fall victim to the cruel solid that is concrete) if we had took the time to make the cusioning around and above the egg more stable.  The whole contraption was built like a copter (with two wings), spinning quickly in the air as it glided down towards earth in 1.43 seconds.  On impact, the spring device on the bottom performed the necessary absorbtion we had planned.  Up to this point, the contraption worked perfectly, with the egg surviving, supposedly.  Though I was distracted by timing the fall with my wrist watch, my partner said that after the egg survived the fall and impact, the contraption tipped over, causing the egg to break because there was no cusioning around it.

This makes sense.  We focused only on the wings and the base spring, completely overlooking this outcome.  But at least next time we will have another possibility to look into and prepare for.

Overall, this was a great project, even if our egg didn't survive.  I'm looking forward to the bridge project coming up some time in the year...

Oh and I might post a diagram of our contraption once it gets graded (it was part of the design document).

By the way, do you have any experiences with the egg drop at your school?  Were you given different limitations than mine?  Give me a shout at bballer_gm@sbcglobal.net and I'll post your comments here.