Students in Mr. Heygi’s class took on an interesting project this week. Heygi asked students to design a model to protect an egg from cracking after dropping the egg from the stadium bleachers. The goal was to build a contraption to keep the egg intact. The activity emphasizes the change from potential energy to the kinetic energy of the devices and their contents and the energy transfer that occurs on impact.
“We were testing momentum and impact,” said Mr. Heygi. “All of their models were very creative, and they had fun with it.”
Students were given materials to complete the project. The materials provided were three sheets of typing paper, ten drinking straws, fifteen popsicle sticks, one meter of string, one meter of masking tape, five rubber bands, one thirty by thirty cm cardboard piece, five cotton balls, five marshmallows, and one raw egg. While the materials were the same for each student group, each student completed this project differently.
Many students used building a parachute to slow the fall down, and some students decided to make a fort around the egg to secure it and avoid hitting the floor. The parachute project ideas worked and resulted in no cracked eggs; however, some of the projects that just used a fort resulted in a cracked egg. Nevertheless, this project went well, and there will be more to see from Heygi’s physics class.
