Eggscellent Project

In this egg planning project, the first step was pretty much done by Professor Kurpis. He told us what he wanted us to accomplish: building a contraption that will protect an egg from a fall. He gave us a deadline (20 mins). He also explained certain conditions we had to meet such as at least half of the egg had to be visible and how one group member had to be on line with the egg and piece of paper with the group members’ names before the clock hit 0. So as a group, we didn’t specifically say “ok, our goal here is to…”

Step 2 was again partially done when Professor Kurpis informed us of what our resources were (8 straws, masking tape, egg, one pair of scissor to be shared by all of the groups, egg). In our group, we did not really go over our strengths or weaknesses. No one asked each other about any skills and no one offered anything about any strength they might have for this particular project. The only thing I can think of as assessing a potential advantage was to see who was the shortest so that the person could be the one to drop the egg at the lowest height. Other than that, we just went straight ahead to coming up with alternative strategies.

Step 3 involves developing the different solutions. There was a lot of stalling here. We came up with a lot of different minor tweaks on essentially one same idea. We came up with only 2 solutions that we were seriously considering to implement when the time came to actually make the contraption. It was either going to be a cage-like device that surrounded the egg and try to buffer it on the fall. Weakness with that is that the straws were quite thin and would not provide much of a buffer. The other alternative which ended up being successful was to connect the straws and tape and have the egg hanging off the end of it so that it had a much shorter fall to the ground. The issue with this was if we had enough straws to be able to provide some cover for the egg and to use for the chain.

In Step 4 we had to choose which alternative we would actually go with. We ended up choosing the 2nd one with the chain of straws because we felt that having the egg fall at a lower height would really help out more. In this step, we did not allocate roles though.
When it came to implementing our plan in step 5, everyone helped out and work with the egg and straws. It was kind of weird I guess because no one actually vocalized and said “I’m going to do this part and you’re going to do that”. But it still work because we were working together and even though we did not officially assign roles, we were still aware of what the others were doing and who needed more tape and things like that. The guys ended up making the chain and the girls worked on putting trying to make an outer cage-like buffer for the egg.

I think we were successful because our idea in having the egg fall from a lower height was a good functional plan; a lot of the other teams had cage-like contraptions that we had also thought about making. The straws just weren’t strong enough to act as effective buffers from a great height. So we gave ourselves the competitive advantage by having it fall from a lower height. But we were also lucky as Professor Kurpis had said other groups who had done similar thing in the past still were not successful in saving the egg.

Even though we were successful, as a group, we could’ve been more effective at planning. We would have been more efficient if we had chosen a leader and maybe apply step 2 more in looking for our strengths and weaknesses. Having assigned roles might have also help time-wise. But overall, I think we got the gist of planning and did well.