The Egg Drop Challenge
by KJ Hannah Greenberg

 

 

Gillian called me up all breathy and hoarse. She wanted to change the time and the location of the party, again. Her weak voice told me that she was, once more, sleeping poorly, and, perhaps, battling a virus. After I explained to her that my family could change locations, but not times, I added that I hoped she would get some rest.

 

The next day, Hubs received an email asking us to dress semi-formally. We ignored that request and dressed as we had planned, i.e., as we had the last time that we had eaten at the “new” location.

 

En route to the celebration, I counted road signs. My beloved child, increasingly, had become a stranger.

 

 

When Gillian was a little girl, she had wanted to wear my shoes, literally, and to engage in whatever activities were keeping me busy. Accordingly, I gave her my old, low pumps with which to make circuits in our apartment. Also, I bought her child-sized, plastic gardening tools. She pulled up “weeds” while I seeded vegetables.

 

If we were together in our kitchen, I would give her bowls of cooled oatmeal to stir and then would redirect her to the cabinet where our pliable storage cartons were housed. The same, I tasked her to arrange all of our dining room chairs.

 

For a time, she had been my shadow, my mimic, my Little Me. Even after her siblings had joined our family, she still wanted nothing more than to emulate her mommy.

 

Years passed. Gillian and her brothers and sisters grew up. Some went to university. Some went to trade school. Some directly entered the workforce.

 

Gillian was among our young who elected to go to college. She had received a full ride in civil engineering. Her focus was structures. Her scholarship was unexpected; Gillian had been an excellent student, but not an outstanding one. Fortunately, that university was culling women for STEM studies.

 

 

I remember when, during her freshman year, in the process of learning about frames, shells, solids, and liquids, she was faced with the egg drop challenge. Basically, all of the teams enrolled in that course were asked to create containers that enabled uncooked eggs, dropped from a height of three stories, to remain intact.

 

Gillian’s group, like the other teams, had to repeat the experiment several times. Each time, they had to employ specified conditions. Once, they were only allowed to build from straws. A second time, they were prohibited from using parachutes. Another time, they were limited to spending five dollars on their kit. Yet another time, they had no limits, whatsoever. Each time, their achievement was measured by whether and how much their eggs cracked or exploded when hitting soil.

 

Variables such as wind or inclement weather, plus possible wreckages involving other teams’ eggs, were factored into those youngsters’ plans. Some of their drops were successful. Others were not.

 

 

My phone beeps. It’s a new text from my grown child. She wants us to attend a “preparty party” at her apartment. She’s forgotten that Hubs and I rearranged our otherwise tight schedules just to be able to attend the originally planned celebration. I grasp my stylus and reply, “no can do.”

 

 

When Gillian was growing up, she was distinguished by her red hair. Few girls had tresses of that hue. Although my daughter was shy by nature, neither children nor adults cared to stop mentioning her locks. What's more, in the summer when the sun brought out her mane’s highlights, the comments multiplied.

 

These days, her coiffure’s a buzz cut. Furthermore, she’s dyed her strands brown; Gillian takes comfort in camouflage.

 

 

Although her group received an “A” on their egg drop project, initially, they had shattered many eggs. Only after they had built double cages, which were formed by triangular pyramids and which were pillowed by large straws taped to each of their pyramids’ edges, did they begin to accomplish their goals. That is, once they stopped pointing their long, plastic utensils at their eggs, and, instead, increased their cages’ resistance to punctures from those “protective” elements, no collision, including smashes that broke those pieces of shielding tubing, mattered—the group had derived contraptions that could absorb the energy of high velocity bumps.

 

Likewise, when Gillian’s group attached parachutes to their eggs’ cages, they only suffered tiny cracks and only in three eggs. Namely, their chutes had helped to counter gravity by slowing down and spreading out kinetic energy such that the impact force on their eggs was dispersed over time. Those kids ascertained what car air bag designers and parkour jumpers (who roll upon landing) have long known; it’s  helpful to defuse forces over increasingly longer periods rather than to focus them upon a single instance.

 

In another case, the one in which Gillian’s team was limited to five dollars’ worth of equipment, they bought pre-popped corn and a bag of the sort of inflatables ordinarily used to make carnival animals. They placed an egg in the middle of all of that cushioning, thus emulating shipping companies’ use of loose fill such as Styrofoam peanuts, Styrofoam bits, air pillows, bubble wrap, and scrunched up packing tissues. Those coeds learned that it’s possible to convert potential energy to kinetic energy so that the force binding eggshells is maintained upon eggs’ accelerated contact with the ground.

 

More exactly, the undergrads had surrounded their eggs with circles of partially filled balloons, which, in turn, they had surrounded with fully blown-up balloons. Thus, they had created a large, cross section of resistance. None of the eggs, in that part of their investigations, even cracked.

 

Interestingly, it was when the team had unlimited resources that they had the poorest results. They purchased a drone. Unlike another team, which had done well by using a small, toy drone, Gillian’s crew had tried to deliver eggs via a videography drone. That massive machine, over and over, crushed its cargo and overshot its mark.

 

 

By the time that Gillian was a tween, she prepared our family’s meals once or twice a week. Additionally, she had begun to bake cookies and cakes. Our home smelled wonderful whenever she helmed our kitchen.

 

Unfortunately, she was less interested in creating sparkling counters and clean sinks than in shaping fudge bars, chocolate chip treats, and blueberry pies. Begrudgingly, her brothers and sisters cleaned up her messes, having been asked by her to make that “contribution.” At least one brother would have preferred to have been the chef.

 

 

Besides learning about the relationship between structure and function, the egg drop challenge taught Gillian and her classmates communication skills, problem solving, teamwork, and so on. Additionally, it taught them to argue from evidence, to evaluate multiple design solutions based on shared criteria, and to engage in critical and creative thinking.

 

After running their tests, the students were tasked to write a Python program that simulated their drops. For their constant variables, “n” equaled one egg and “k” equaled three floors. Hubs, who’s a software expert, coached Gillian. She then guided her teammates.

 

 

Ironically, our family’s messy baker eagerly embraced the exactitudes of structural engineering. She wanted buildings to be safe, especially, to be capable of withstanding floods and earthquakes. That girl was particularly fascinated with designing upgrades that could amp up older constructions’ integrity. Eventually, she earned a graduate degree.

 

While matriculating through her master’s degree, Gillian was given an assignment in which she was “trapped,” via a computer simulation, in a building bombed by terrorists. She failed that assignment since she: panicked, didn’t cover her head with her arms, didn’t avoid crowds once she exited the building, and didn’t run away from that building to a nearby park.

 

After that poor academic outcome, my girl almost dropped out of graduate school. Fortunately, the class in which she had failed the assignment was an elective, so, I was able to convince her to drop that class instead of dropping out of the degree program. During her second year in that her program, she made up her lost credits by taking a “fun” course in soil mechanics.

 

However, in another structures course, Gillian was driving, again via mathematical modeling, on a bridge that was buckling. On the one hand, she had rolled down her imaginary windows, fastened her seatbelt, and kept her hand on her horn. Her avatar was injured but not killed. On the other hand, my dear one texted me to complain that she had received a “B” on that assignment. Apparently, staying alive was insufficient; an engineer, should have looked for cracks when approaching the bridge’s tollbooth.

 

 

As Gillian aged in years, she aged out of  my life. When she became engaged to George, I thought we’d be adding an “adopted” son to our family. That young man, who was the child of one of my friends, seemed nice enough. Indeed, it had been me who had suggested that he and Gillian meet.

 

Sadly, rather than add to my home, he diminished it. More exactly, he told Gillian that I was the source of all her problems. Moreover, unlike the times, when as a child, when he had visited my home with his mother, newlywed George spoke very little, offering up only thoughts about the weather or major league baseball.

 

Thereafter, he insisted that I was unwelcomed at the birth of his and Gillian’s children either as an advocate for my girl or as a helper to her, a postpartum mom. In fact, when Gillian was on maternity leave, George made sure that I visited only when he was at work. To boot, since he refused to part with my daughter’s handsome engineering salary, weeks after each of their children were born, those grandkids were placed in day care.

 

 

I had driven Gillian and her sisters from boutique to boutique to hunt for the “perfect” bridal gown. Into the bargain, I had spent hours running from florist to florist until my daughter decided on David Austin Juliet roses accented with clusters of  lily of the valley. As per her shoes. I had sourced them at an upscale store. Correspondingly, it was me who had remembered that she had wanted to select simple necklaces as attendants’ gifts.

 

When my child and her husband honeymooned, her towers of presents, her kitten, and her future apartment’s furnishings used up most of the available floorspace in my home. I even hushed her siblings and whispered soothingly to the love of my life when they complained about the resulting domestic dysfunction.

 

 

I adore the daughters-in-law and additional sons-in-law that I’ve since gained. They talk to my husband and me about finances, childrearing, and their long-term dreams. One among them built new bookcases for us. Another organized a funded, surprise vacation for our fiftieth anniversary. Those others readily give us their babies to cuddle whenever they visit, too.

 

Gillian, contrariwise, runs farther and farther from my embrace. Last year, she bought a condo a few hours more distant from us and from what was supposed to be her “forever” domicile.

 

During a rare visit from her, one which involved her kids but not her husband, she perused photos. I only caught a glance at which albums she was viewing because one of her children had knocked over a pot of mashed potatoes and another was pulling the tail of Gillian’s cat, the one that she never reclaimed after her wedding.

 

That small glance, though, caught my breath. She had two albums open. In the first, she was viewing photos taken during her egg drop trials. In the second, she was looking at pictures of herself, as a toddler, wearing my overlarge shoes.

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