Danielle Spaete (Pleasant Valley HS, IA) came up with a great new way to do egg-drop contests using our Force Plate. Students are given a 5-gallon bucket to be placed on a Force Plate. They then drop a basketball from a height of 1.5 meters into the bucket.
After observing the forces applied by the basketball, students are challenged to build an “air bag” out of newspaper to help cushion the fall. In a traditional egg-drop experiment, there isn’t any measurement; the egg either breaks or it doesn’t, and you only get one chance. With Danielle’s method, students get quanitative results, and they can do the experiment over and over again. As an added bonus, the cleanup is a cinch!