The Falling Egg by Miguel

The Falling Egg by Miguel - October 2026 Scholarship Essay

When I had originally learned that I was going to partake in the egg drop project in middle school, I thought of it to be relatively straightforward and simple. I thought that all I would need to do was just throw in a random assortment of arts and craft materials into a box and viola, I get a 100%. Because of this pre conceived notion I had that we could use whatever we wanted, I was surprised when the day came that my teacher was going to explain the project. She told us that the only things we could use were paper, biodegradable straws,cardboard, and glue. So now, coupled with the fact that I wasn't too familiar with the intricacies of physics and gravity, I had to do even more external research about it and ended up discovering a whole new world of information because of this research. This project, unbeknownst to me, would be the catalyst for my love of Physics and the way it worked.

As previously mentioned, my first design was, to put it lightly, very rough. I started with a small cardboard box, cut up a good amount of straws, attempting to mimic something like packing peanuts for the egg. On the first test, I dropped it from the top of my roof at home and unsurprisingly (considering what I know now), it completely shattered. At the time I was very confused. I thought to myself, why did the egg break? I thought that if I had used enough material on the bottom of the egg, it would've been fine. This loss led me to do more research and discover new concepts I had never heard of before.

After watching video after video about physics I became aware of the concept of Impulse. In the context of physics, impulse is the change in momentum of an object and is always determined by specifically 2 things, those being force and time. In the egg drop projects case, when the container hits the ground, it obviously completely stops. Because I dropped it from a short height, the time of impact was short so the impact is a lot more sudden and therefore greater. With this, I came to the conclusion that my contraption wasn't absorbing the energy from the drop, rather, it was channeling it straight through, directly to the egg.
It was then that I realized that I had to think outside the box (literally).

Now with all the research I did and the new concepts I had learned, I knew that instead of focusing on the amount of material used, I should focus on where I would allocate these resources. I got rid of the old traditional box I originally used in favor of a cone like structure to keep the egg in place also made with cardboard that I would then glue on the straws and cut them in quarters so they would crumple or fold outwards upon impact. This allowed the actual force and energy of the impact to be dispersed among the 4 straws. This structure created distance from the egg to the ground and also gave it more time to stop movement, thereby reducing the force exerted on the egg.

When the day came where I had to actually test it for a grade, I watched it hit the ground seemingly hard, convinced that it had failed. When we came down to check, I opened it and it was completely unscathed. This taught me that the science involved in physics didn't have to be limited to just memorizing formulas and vocabulary for the sake of academic success, but that it could also apply to things in our everyday lives. I also learned, frustratingly at times, that failure is often the best teacher. It also made me connect this project to other things like how the fronts of cars are designed to crumble to disperse force in case of a crash. This project reinvigorated my love for science as, at the time, what we were learning was starting to become stagnant and uninteresting. It also didn't just result in a good grade for me, but led to me appreciating the inner workings of physics and how that related to the real world that even to this day I'm still interested in.