Reflections

Egg challenge

The egg challenge is the first activity we conducted during Advanced Physics lesson and it required a team of 3 to construct a passive device, a device that is not capable of power gain, so that the egg contained in the device would not crack after being dropped from a height of 2.5m. An additional requirement is that we had to make sure the dimensions of our device are as small as possible.

The device my group constructed was 3470cm^3, which in fact was actually one of the largest device among the other groups. Our device was made of straws to form a pyramid-like structure, with sticks inserted in the straws to make the device firmer and less vulnerable to breakage. The purpose of the pyramid-like shape was to distribute the impact of the fall to the sticks and the straws instead of the egg. As the greater the mass of the device, the higher the momentum of the fall, we tried to minimize the mass of the device by using light-weight materials such as straws. As the momentum is obtained by taking the mass multiplied by the velocity, reducing the mass of the device will in turn reduce the momentum and the impact of the fall.

From this activity, I have learnt about the various factors affecting the momentum of an object. From the presentations and devices other groups made, I also learnt about different ways of creating a passive device to prevent the egg from cracking. This activity was very enriching and fun and I gained a lot of knowledge from it.

​