#HTE

Industrial Designer Dad Helps High School Daughters Rock the “Safely Drop an Egg” Challenge

A father and industrial designer, who has asked to remain anonymous, provided these videos. He and his kids are cooped up during the COVID-19 crisis, with remote classes in effect. “My two girls, who are seniors in high school, had a physics project to do,” he writes. As it turns out, their project is very similar to what our first assignment was in Industrial Design school: Design a vessel to safely house an egg dropped off of a balcony.

Materials

Students were allowed to use whatever materials they could get their hands on–but with stores in lockdown, that basically meant whatever you could find at a hardware store or supermarket.

“The closest open store was our local Ace Hardware. They had:

- Rubber bands

- Straws and pool noodles

- PVC tubing”

Design

The school provided dimensional guidelines:

ID Dad added a further restriction: “The one rule I had was, they weren’t allowed to copy all of the different designs you could find on YouTube,” he writes. But that didn’t mean that their father couldn’t give them some design guidance. “I suggested trying to determine the center of gravity, and to think about how they wanted the egg to fall. I had them sketch up ideas, and we talked through about each one about the pros and cons.

"Given our materials, we settled on arches and circles as a big theme in how we wanted to protect the egg. Also wanted to make sure we displaced the energy to the structure and not the egg.”

Results

“We tested five designs, and four worked:”

As for the one that failed?

“This one broke on impact, but I know how to fix it,” ID Dad writes.

“I’m going to model it in Solidworks and 3D print it. Will have 3D printed rubber bumpers as well. The rubber bands work amazingly well.”