Saving Chicken Little

Kepler

No chickens were harmed in the making of this

By: Luigi Gavino #10

8D

Only Chicken eggs

Purpose
Even though having a project based around throwing a chicken egg of a high place might not make
sense to the common eye, it actually incorporates some of the most interesting and important physics
concepts. Among them, you can find free fall, in a few words, this term can be considered when an
object, without any other force, is pulled into gravity and moves along without interference. It is worth
knowing that there is (or was) a debate regarding the effect that an objects weight has in free fall,
with Aristotle claiming that heavier objects fall faster, while Galileo denies said statement. Regardless,
even thought in regular circumstances, heavier objects do fall faster, its not due to gravity having a
weaker pull in them, rather, it because they are less affected by air resistance, while lighter objects
are affected by it, causing them to fall on a slower pace. Thus, in a environment without air, both
objects would fall on a equal pace. One factor that is related to free fall are the Kinematic equations,
they are often used to find missing components in free falling experiments(distance, initial velocity,
acceleration, etc.).

Regardless, the way I am going to show my understanding for said concepts is by doing what I
mentioned in the start of this slide, and by that I mean throwing an egg of multiple high places and
recording many factors in each place. However, in this occasion, I am supposed to build a ship to
keep the egg from breaking and add some balloons in order to create the slowest possible falling
speed.

Concept
Originally, I had a very simple plan for my ship, it was just some plain reusable vase with
a few balloons tied to its sides. However, the more I thought about my design, the more it
deviated from the original idea. My first change was the addition of cotton inside the vase
in order to soften up any sudden moves, the next change was that I had to move the
balloons to make them more even, in order to prevent the cup from spinning out of control,
the last change was the addition of plastic in the cups opening, in order to keep the egg
alongside with the cotton inside the vase.

Update: Now that I have fully completed the project, I realised some things that I would
have done differently in order to make it better. Chief among them would be remove a large
part of the cup in order to make it smaller, as this would reduce its weight and allow me to
wast less cotton, as I feel like product had a harder time dealing with all of the cotton I
added rather than the egg itself.

Testing

Bar Graph
Velocity has been rounded to nearest whole number

Analysing Data

Well then, after giving my gate data a naked look, I was not able to find any sort of pattern, rather, it
appeared that all of my times were completely random and had no correlation to each other. I also
noticed that, when compared to the rest of my class, my ballon had an extreme speed, luckily the
egg did not break, however, I believe that only occurred because it was shielded with cotton to the
teeth (That is a metaphor). So it can be said that the saviour of the day was good old Captain Cotton.
Also, I noticed that my cup always landed upwards and rarely had any sudden or random
movements during its descend, I believe this occurred since I put my balloons at similar distances
from each other, causing them to balance the overall weight and keeping the cup from doing
somersaults, so maybe Ballony (Cottons sidekick) did play an important role in defeating Gravitron
The Egg Breaker.

Ok, after taking a while to reflect my results and creating the graph, I have noticed that my times had
a very interesting curve, as when I compare back to back results, it appears that the velocity
increased on a slight angle( in each stage, the times went up on a very similar scale), I also noticed
that most of my velocities had a gradual increase of about 4 m/s

Conclusion
Well, what can I say? Well then, it appears that I required a few more balloons in order to create a more steady
speed, and I can safely say that one of the main reasons that my egg is alive was due to the heavy cotton shielding
I gave it, along with the position I put my balloons, which caused an similar weight around the cup. Speaking of
weight, I just realised a factor that had a huge impact on my overall speed, that is air resistance, you see, lighter
objects appear to have a slower free fall since the air is impeding their fall, while heavy objects break throughout
this resistance with ease. Since I used a lot of cotton in my project, the gained weight caused it to break through the
air with ease. Even though I am sure I could have gotten a slower speed by doing the changes I stated in
Concept, I am proud with my overall result, and even though I had a few complications during the testing, I had
fun making this project. Also I just created the 2 most epic superheroes ever.