TEXT AND PHOTOS BY AIDAN GILLESPIE OF THE SCREAMING CAMELS
Hi! I’m Aidan - the keeper of egg puns for this week :D
STEM Club is fun, gets me making stuff, gets my mind working to make cool contraptions.
This week’s session was the engineering challenge, aka Egg Drop.
We had had to postpone this challenge for a few weeks because it was windy and rainy (hello Wellington). This week the weather was positively sunny side up, which made it a great day for our Egg Drop Challenge.
Nigel set us up with a scenario where we were to launch the newest spacecraft to Mars. We were the engineers who had to make the contraptions that would make sure it landed safely. I really liked how Nigel set up the scenario for us. It made it fun and egg-citing and inspired us with our own designs.
I enjoyed this challenge very much and there were some tricky bits. We had to make sure the eggs were well padded and try to slow down our capsules for landing. It’s HARD boiled to get the egg to land safely, so having to think about how to keep the egg from breaking when dropped from 5 metres high is a challenge. We all enjoyed working through this.
- this is how high up we dropped our contraptions from!
I built my contraption out of plumbers pipe insulation and I put a parachute on mine. This slowed it down just enough so that the egg didn’t crack.
In the end only one egg got scrambled!
This might have been my favourite week ever since starting Stem Club earlier this year. Others in our group said the same thing!
Some of the other designs included shock absorbers
...different sorts of parachutes, and balloons.
Now it’s time to meet some of the contraptions:
We have The Floating Cushion
The Jellyfish
The Adventurer
The Jet Pack
And The Cup
I would recommend the egg drop for anyone who wants a fun and creative challenge! It’s egg-ceptional! ;)
PS. This is our group with the STEM Club mascot we made
