In my egg drop package I used: poster board, staples, ten pennies, model magic clay, rice krispies cereal, a slurpie lid, streamers, and a raw chicken egg. To construct my project, I cut a slit in a piece of poster board and rolled it into a cone shape. I used staples to secure the cone. Then, I placed ten pennies in the bottom of the poster board cone and put some clay on top of them to hold them in place. Next, I filled the cone three-fourths full of rice krispies cereal. Then, I placed the raw chicken egg on top of the cereal and covered it with more rice krispies. Next, I attached the slurpie lid to the top of the cone. Finally, I attached the streamers to the sides of the cone.
I came up with this model because I knew that the package needed to absorb the shock of hitting the ground. The point of the cone hits the ground and crumples. The rice krispies also crunch to absorb the impact force. The pennies at the tip of the cone are needed to make sure that the package would fall "tip first" and not lean to one side. The streamers also help keep the package upright. After the tip of the cone crumples and the rice krispies are crunched, there is little shock left to harm the egg.
Since the egg drop package is in a free-fall state for approximately twenty feet, the only force acting upon it is gravity (the significance of air resistance is minimal in this case). All objects fall at the same rate of acceleration, regardless of their mass. We would think that a more massive project would experience a greater force of gravity. It might be thought that this greater force of gravity would accelerate the more massive project faster, but acceleration depends upon two factors - force and mass. If we applied Newton's Second Law of Motion to this egg drop lab, we would find that the heavier project might have more mass, but this increased mass has an opposite effect on its acceleration.
