Monday, October 20, 2014

Egg Drop Results - Historical

Readers of this blog know that I've done the egg drop experiment several times with my high school students.  We just finished the project again this Fall.  I started the project during the Fall 2007 term and have continued it each year in my high school physics classes.  My students did a great job this fall and being the geek that I am, I dug through all of my notebooks and tabulated the results to determine survival rates of dropping from specific heights.  I left out the Fall 2007 term in my results since that group of students had a full sized grocery bag to use which made the project a bit too easy.  The table below shows survival rates for 102 ships starting with the Fall 2008 term and ending with the 2014 term.

2 feet survival rate = 100%
6 feet survival rate = 94.12%
2nd floor survival rate = 72.55%
3rd floor survival rate = 50.00%
4th floor survival rate = 34.31%
4th floor (rocks) survival rate = 12.75%
4th floor (rocks, upside down) survival rates = 5.88% (5 ships all time)
4th floor (rocks, thrown downward) survival rates = 2.94% (3 ships all time)
4th floor (rocks, thrown upward) survival rates = 1.96% (2 ships all time)
4th floor (rocks, thrown outward) survival rates = 1.96% (2 ships all time)
This year's winner is one of the 2 ships all time that survived everything we could do to it!  It finally broke when I removed a few pieces!!!  Here's what it looked like, minus the sandwhich bag I removed.

A big congratulations to these two students!

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