Team Meeting on Friday 2/23/06

Today in our meeting we contined to brainstorm ideas. During our meeting we looked at previous years' challenges' devices to help us with the brainstorming. As we were looking at our devices we thought about:

• attaching velcro to the wheels of a vehicle to make it possible to go up the carpet.
• having a pulley that can somehow be thrown to the top of the crater as our device falls to the bottom of the crater. The pulley will then pull up the device.
  
• helicopters that can fly for as long as 10 minutes!

Second Team Meeting 2/9/07

For our second meeting we continued brainstorming. Matthew's dad remembered that Matthew, Anisha, and Ashwin had all done egg drops in their science classes. We were discussing this project because we thought it could help us with the part of the challenge when our device is released from 11 feet above the ground. In Matthew and Anisha's science classes the teacher allowed them only three pieces of paper and in Ashwin's class the teacher allowed him to use only environmentally friendly materials. Matthew and Anisha both had the idea of protecting their eggs with paper cones as well as parachutes and Ashwin decided to put his egg inside a grapefruit and protect the egg with jello. We talked in detail about the cone because it absorbs the impact of the fall of the egg and we thought this could be applied to our device in some way.

We also discussed their classmates' ideas as well. Many ended up using cones for their designs and some used boxes. Another student made tiny little tubes of paper and put them around the egg in a log cabin form. And another student also made tubes of paper and attached them around the egg with the ends of the tubes attached to the egg in a kind of sea urchin way. We continued our discussion for awhile and started thinking of ideas of how our own device could be protected during its own fall. Below our ideas of different ways to protect our device:

• bubble wrap
• a box with a door that could open when our device hits the ground
  
• parachute
• half inflated beach ball
• something that cracks open when it hits the ground

First Team Meeting 2/4/07

Our first meeting was spent brainstorming over dinner. We began by telling Cassie and Anisha about our time at the info clinic and answering any questions they had. Then we all looked over the diagrams in the guide booklet and discussed some ideas. Cassie's dad had recorded a video of the information clinic which was really helpful. It made explaining this year's challenge to everyone a lot easier.

Brainstorming

• padding for fall: water wings, balloon
• throw something over (winch)
• Question: How much of the vehicle has to be below the lip?
• grappling hooks (a lot)
• umbrella parachute

We also discussed an idea in which our device never touches the bottom of the crater but instead glides onto the platform after being released. A variation on this idea was to have something shoot out as the device was released and set off the sensor. We weren't sure if these ideas would be fitting with the "spirit of the challenge."