Catching a free-falling egg from 1m, 2m, and 5m. Please help! :)

[Camaro]

I'm doing a project for school and I need to catch the egg using limited materials from 1m, 2m, and 5m.

 

The materials I'm allowed are:

6 pieces of paper of normal paper

100 cm of masking tape.

NO OTHER MATERIALS!

 

The 'catcher' has to stand on its own (on the ground) and the egg isn't allowed to be subjected to modification.

[Milad]

form a bowl, from the paper!!! surrounded in maskin tape, concentrate the paper on the bottom of the bowl in order to produce a cushion.

[Mr Skeptic]

What you need to do is make a design that has plenty of room to crumple, so that the egg does not come to a sudden stop. However, it should not crumple so easily as to not slow the egg before it reaches the end of the crumple zone.

 

The longer the distance over which you slow the egg, the less acceleration it will need and the less likely you are to break the egg.

[npts2020]

I will leave it up to you about how to use sheets of crumpled paper but when you drop the egg, make sure you drop it with the narrow end pointing down. Also, the fresher the egg, the tougher the shell will be.

[Camaro]

Thanks for the replys guys, we ended up folding paper criss cross to make springs, than made a bowel on top of the paper springs, and then crumpled paper in between the springs. Hopefully it works

[Phi for All]

Thanks for the replys guys, we ended up folding paper criss cross to make springs, than made a bowel on top of the paper springs, and then crumpled paper in between the springs. Hopefully it works

OK, ewww. I thought you could only use paper and masking tape.

[mooeypoo]

The point of the egg 'drop' experiment, many times, is to demonstrate how the brain and skull work. Usually, you would take an egg, put it in a bag full of water, and throw it off a certain height to see that unlike an unprotected egg, the 'protected' egg survived.

 

The impact from hitting the ground is spread around through the liquid, and the egg remains safe.

 

Following this logic, I would cover the egg with something soft and 'bouncy' (i am not sure how you made those springs, but crumpling pieces of paper and putting them around the egg should be okay) and then encapsulate that entirely with the masking tape so you essentially have a shell filled with some bouncy/airy(yet fairly tight) stuff to absorb the impact, and in the middle, your egg.

 

When you said you have 6 pieces of paper I immediately thought that this could be their intention -- crumple each paper to produce a "springy" cushion and the 6 sides are covering the entire egg from all directions (like the 6 sides of a cube) so no matter where it falls, it's fairly cushioned.

 

 

On top of everything, if the catcher is allowed, (s)he would do better to catch the egg while following its movement -- that is, to provide another layer of 'cushion' to the movement and slow the fall instead of 'hitting' it head on.

 

Good luck! come back and tell us what worked