November 2020
How far can you drop an egg without breaking it?
Well, it depends on a few things. Not just gravity and the force of impact, but your wits, your resources, and your enthusiasm to build a spaceship that will protect it.
Our whole school participated in the Spaceship Challenge organised by our teacher Dave Mason. By competing in smaller challenges, we won points, with which we could choose and purchase materials to build a ‘spaceship’ for our egg.
The game was on. Doing well in these smaller challenges would give us more ‘money’/points, to buy better materials to build our spaceship.
We did super well in the “Don’t drop a bomb’ challenge. We had to lift a bucket filled water on to a platform using bungee cords. And we got full points for this challenge. That’s right. 300 points. With these points we made the decision that we would buy a large amount of lower quality materials. You could choose between high and low quality materials, at different costs, and that’s what we decided would be the best use of our money.
We did not do quite so well on the memory challenge, only getting half the points, but we had enough to build our spaceship.
The big challenge was then to drop the spaceship from a height without the egg inside breaking. The first time we dropped it – success! The egg did not break. But the second time, well, it broke. So, one success and one failure.
We learned that it’s hard to go shopping! There are so many decisions to make. So we learned about much more than how to protect an egg, but how to work as a team, how to spend our money and how to adapt to a changing situation.
