Wednesday, June 6, 2012

Egg Drop

Landon’s final 5th grade project was to make an egg contraption that could be dropped from different heights without breaking his egg.

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Since we’ve been busy, it came down to the wire for us to get this project completed with him. He had some great ideas, but the rules were very limiting and the project was only able to weigh 100 grams with the egg included! (Eggs typically weigh about 50 grams, so that didn’t leave much material to work with.) He and Tony set to work on the project, but kept finding that their contraption would flip or be too heavy, so it turned into quite a process.

On Monday night, Harper wanted to watch Barney, so I decided to go to the table to see what I could come up with…just for fun. It ended up being really fun to do and my project ended up working really well.

Here’s what it looked like:

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Balloons and straws barely weigh anything, so they were an easy medium to use. I was able to drop it from the deck without the egg breaking so I thought it was a winner until we woke up Tuesday morning to find that a couple of the balloons had deflated!

So, Landon ended up bringing in the contraption that he and Tony had created, which looked like this:

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Styrofoam, cotton balls, yarn and a tiny plastic cup is what they used to put theirs together. We also dropped this one from the deck and it held up fine so we were again sure Landon would have a winner. The only thing we hadn’t accounted for was wind, and mother nature threw that into the equation on Tuesday’s drop, so it ended up flipping in the air and cracking the egg which resulted in a loss for Landon.

He still earned an A on his project but we think if the wind hadn’t blown it over it could have gone a lot further!

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