When you think of physics class the last thing you think of is competition, but that changed when the egg drop experiment came around.

The students separated into teams of two in order to design and build their own object that would keep an egg safe from a 3-meter drop, an inclined ramp, and a shove down a flight of stairs. The only rules were no parachutes or gels. Many students went for a simple design, the straw man. The straw man is a pyramid structure made of straws to hold the egg and then taped straws to the edges to dispel the energy of the fall.

But one of the most original designs was lead by Chance Bohlander and his team.

“I think our group had one of the coolest designs, we took a toilet paper tube and made it into a helicopter,” he said.

Bohlander’s design was like a maple seed. It spun in order to create a softer landing.

“We made it spin in order to create more wind resistance, thus slowing the body down enough for a soft landing,” he said.

The design passed all three tests, although the team had to make modifications to the vehicle for each test.

“We definitely had the most modifications out of any group. We had about seven modifications for the machine, but no more than three were on at the same time,” he said

For the incline plane they used their vehicle like a cart, attaching wheels to an axle to keep the cart on track. For the stair drop, they used straws and wooden skewers to keep the body from hitting the stairs.

“I was most worried about the incline plane because we had only tested it once before, so we didn’t really know how it would turn out,” he said.

In the end nearly every group in the class made it through all three tests.

“I feel like we won. We may have had the most modifications, but we still had the smallest base.”