Team X Status Report 4

Team X Status Report!

Today was the day, the day of our egg drop! The level of confidence went down so much you couldn’t even see it. My whole group were so nervous because we have changed our design so many times that I definitely lost hope in the lander landing safely.

We went to science class very worried about not finishing our lander to the standards we expected. As soon as we put our books down we bought some tape and finished putting our lander together making sure it was as secure as we could get it. Then we went to to the bench in the hallway to drop our lander for our design test making sure that our control variables (such as who dropped it and the height of where we dropped it) stayed the same. After half an hour it was time to drop our egg!!! The first round you had to drop your lander from halfway up the stairs. As everyone started dropping their landers one by one it made me even more nervous and kind of lose hope because nobody’s eggs were surviving until Kaylin’s group and soon after Aadit’s group safely landed their landers. This didn’t ease my nerves because their landers were fancy straw ones with parachutes unlike ours was just a box with a parachute. Before we knew it, it was our turn to drop our lander. Three, two, one GO! There was nothing we could do anymore our lander was falling however, to our delight, it was falling fairly slowly. When it hit the bottom my heart sank because in my head the thud was louder then an explosion but in reality it was fairly quiet. Then we checked the egg to see if it had broken… IT HADN’T BROKEN!!!!!!!!!!!! No words could explain how I felt because all our hard work and stressed conversation worked, but that was wasn’t the end. We still had to make it through the second level, this was from the top of the stairs, three other groups had also made it that far. Just before we were about to start our parachute got tangled up and we were freaking out. Thankfully we were able to untangle our parachute and were able to drop. When we dropped our lander it did fall a little faster and that did scare me so much. When we checked if the egg broke, we found out… IT DIDN’T!!! Our lander did land the closest to the ‘X’ however we had the highest budget out of the three groups who made the drop. On Thursday we will drop our lander from the roof and hopefully it survives :)

I think the main reason why our lander landed safely was because of our parachute. We used a material (half a bin bag)that had a large surface area, which causes a lot of air resistance and a slow descent. This can be seen in our recording of the egg drop. If you want to know more about of egg drop journey check my other blog posts out (1, 2, and 3)