Egg Drop 2001

On Saturday April 14 2001, a brave group of students in the third, fourth and fifth grades arrived at Hicks Hall on a mission. They had spent careful hours designing and building a series of ingenious devices to overcome a difficult engineering challenge. Armed with whatever materials they could find, they had set out to do the almost impossible: protect an egg from a dizzying forty-foot drop onto hard, unforgiving pavement! Now, the time had come to put their efforts to the test, and watch their contraptions fall from the roof of Hicks.
	The contestants assembled in the Mural Room on the third floor, where their devices were tagged and their names appeared on the screen. The room was full of the sound of excited chatter as the judges carefully weighed each entry down to a tenth of a gram. The devices were designed to be as light as possible!
Soon, all the devices were weighed, and it was time to begin dropping them! The Mural Room quickly emptied as all the contestents hurried down the stairs and out to the Egg Drop Zone. They peered up at the man sitting on the edge of the roof high over their heads, silhouetted against the bright morning sky. They watched as he lifted the first contraption and held it out over the pavement forty feet below. And then...
	Five! Four! Three! Two! One! DROP! Each device streaked toward the ground and struck the concrete with a tremendous THUD, eliciting a roar from the watching students. Then, each contestant in turn had the heart-thumping moment of running forward, carefully lifting his or her device from the ground, prying it open, and examining the egg to see if the device was successful. Meanwhile, judges timed each device from the moment it left the dropper's hand to the moment it struck the ground, and wrote down the results.

Everyone returned to the Mural Room to watch as the judges displayed each device's score on the screen. Great prizes were given out to the students who engineered the top three entries, to the sound of thunderous applause.
Thank you to Nether Providence and Swarthmore Rutledge Schools for helping us recruit contestants. Thank you to all the Swarthmore College students who helped run the event. And most of all, thank you to all the students who took the challenge, built devices for us to drop, and made our contest a success.