The objective of the naked egg drop was to successfully create a contraption using the budget of 100 bendy straws and tape. Different factors including how high the egg was dropped, and the weight of the contraption played a role in the scoring of the drops in the end as well. The math of the three egg drops is pictured below.
Joel and I approached the design and sketch with a list of certain criteria we had listed in the beginning of the project. The criteria that we had discussed included survivability of the egg, durability of the catching apparatus. We started to sketch a box design that would have a collapsible structure to absorb the energy from the egg. (9-15-16)
We were going to stick with design but Joel and I missed a lab (9-22-16) during flooding which left me at home able to redesign. I consulted with Joel and started brainstorming ideas that would better catch the egg. I thought that incorporating a funnel into a cube structure would be a bit more challenging than it needed to be. Therefore I sketched a taller rectangle catcher. I ended up liking it better than the original design.
(9-27-16) Joel and I received an extra team member, Rebekah. Since we missed the building day the three of us got right to building the catching apparatus. We built based off the taller catcher in the second sketch. By the end of class we got this far...
The only difference Between the sketch and the actual contraption is the base. It was a last minute design entry and it turned out to work very great! Actually our first design could successfully catch an egg, which was very exciting.
(9-29-16) This was the day that we had to test the catchers. Before we did the final three egg drops we wanted to do a few quick drops to see where we were at in terms of accuracy, and usefulness. We wanted to drop from a good 10 ft. The catcher successfully handled it... after a few tries because we missed two times. So we went back to redesign and added an increased opening for which the egg could fall in. Joel, Rebekah and I also added tape around the sides to ensure the egg doesn't fall through the sides during its free fall. The final design looked like this:
And showed that it was successful at catching an egg.
After we felt comfortable with our design we were ready to test. Joel weighed our 3 eggs. They ended weighing 59g, 59.8g, and 57.6g. Afterwards we weighed our catcher which came to around 69.5 g. I found it interesting that our catcher weighed only 10.5g more than our heaviest egg. The first two drops were from 8 ft. Unfortunately we didn't realize that dropping the egg through the hole on the ladder wouldn't work, therefore our first two drops the 59g, and 59.8g egg ended up breaking completely. We thought we should switch it up for the third drop so that we can ensure that we get some points on the board, so with very careful aiming with the plum bob we were able to successfully drop the egg from 7ft.
Overall even though the drop wasn't the most successful for Spain (A.K.A. Joel, Bekah, and I) it was an excellent team building exercise. We had obstacles such as the flooding to cut our time short, but overall we came together in the end to build a working contraption. If I could go back and redo the test I would ensure that we would be so much more careful on aiming, and use the plum bob more. But the egg drop taught me very excellent teamwork skills that ill be able to hold onto for years to come!
Here is a video of Spain's egg catcher from about 12ft. (After the final drops)
**** and 1/2 * the objective was off. Great Videos! Who was on the wall?
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