Fortifying an Egg

In class, we were given a group task to complete. The task was to take 25 minutes and plan out how we would build some sort of protection mechanism for an egg, with 8 straws and 2 feet of tape, which would prevent the egg from being broken when dropped from 10 feet. After the assignment was assigned to our team, we began planning immediately. Using the steps in the planning process as our judge, we incorporated a part of each step into our planning process, but there is room for improvement. The goals and guidelines were clearly established for us, since this was a short-term in class assignment. We did know about what resources we had available to us, but did identify each team member's strengths and allocate work accordingly. One of our team members immediately came up with a design. After perfecting this design, we did come up with two other plans, but decided on using the original idea because it was by far the best. On actually making a plan to implement is where great improvement could have occurred. We did briefly divide up the labor of constructing our contraption, but we did not do this effectively enough. This is where our main flaw occurred, which hindered us from success. We should have better divided up the work, so each person knew exactly what to do during the 10 minute construction period. We did implement our idea, as everyone else in the class did, but did not take time to reflect and evaluate our results.

Since we did not plan out the actual construction well enough, we found ourselves rushing to complete the construction in the allocated time. Even though our design was excellent, we did not have enough time to secure our egg inside of our contraption well enough, therefore it broke on impact. If we would have better planned out and allocated duties during the construction period I believe our egg would not have broke.