Cranberry High School teacher Zach Bedee helps students with their creative method of protecting their egg.
By DYLAN SALSGIVER
Student Contributor
Cranberry High School 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 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 the class 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, based on the assignment’s parameters, kept the egg from cracking. This interactive activity provides an excellent demonstration of how alterations in one variable affect another variable such as mass, velocity, impact forces, and impulse.
Bedee took the students out of the classroom and into the commons at the school 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, Bedee said, “Students’ designs have performed better than they have in previous years with several surprising results coming from eggs wrapped in odd packages.”
Cranberry High School student Alex Finch reviews the structure he and his partner made to protect their egg.
Dylan Salsgiver is a student at Cranberry High School and a member of Cranberry Chronicles, the school’s journalism/publications group.
