Physics Egg Drop 

Eggs can’t fly...or can they?

Teacher, Zack Bedee, takes his Academic Physics students to test their designs they’ve constructed to prevent an egg from cracking.

Students in Academic Physics, taught by Zack Bedee, began learning a new unit dealing with momentum, impulse, and collisions involving objects. 

Students have been studying the impulse-momentum theorem. The impulse-momentum theorem is used to describe collisions between objects in terms of their speeds, sizes, collision times, and impact forces. 

Every year, students in Physics look forward to participating in the egg drop tradition at Cranberry. The goal of this experiment is to see if the students could drop an egg from twenty feet without cracking their egg. 

Students had to analyze if their protective design kept the egg from cracking.  Students had to use this to analyze their designs based on the assignment’s parameters. This interactive activity provides an excellent demonstration of how alterations in one variable affect another variable such as mass, velocity, impact forces, and impulse. 

Mr. Bedee took the students out of the classroom and into the commons at Cranberry to drop the eggs from the rafters. There were various designs and creative dropping methods given by the students, most of which passed the test. 

When asked how he thought the egg drop test went, Mr. Bedee said, “Students’ designs have performed better than they have in previous years with several surprising results coming from eggs wrapped in odd packages”.