No yolk: SEF egg drop challenge a huge success Megan Bentley, center, and friend anxiously await Bentley’s egg drop as event master of ceremonies Stephen Rosales looks on. Photo by Michael Dashiell. by MICHAEL DASHIELL Staff writer On Friday night, Angela Bentley finally figured out the design that would give her raw egg the best chance to survive the great fall. She never thought this would beat them all. But come Saturday morning, Bentley’s padded, cone-shaped device with balloon attachment wound up as the top design at the first Sequim Education Foundation Engineering Challenge Egg Drop, one that saw more than 220 registered participants plus parents and volunteers pack the Sequim Community Church Fellowship Center. Bentley, a sixth-grader at Sequim Middle School, said she and her family tried several different designs, then started all over. “We had different ideas and it didn’t work,” Bentley said. So just before crawling in bed, Bentley cooked up the idea to shape her egg carrier like a cone — “because it’s a shock absorber,” she says — and added the balloon to slow the egg’s fall. Good thing, too; a number of top designs at Saturday’s egg drop utilized balloons as a design feature, helping the eggs “survive” the 31-foot drop from the church building’s catwalk. The best scorer in the most crowded category was Alison Cobb’s design, with more than 130 elementary school students hoping to take top honors. Cobb, a fourth-grader at Helen Haller Elementary, said she and her father put together an egg carrier with a balloon. The day before the contest, she blew up that balloon, then worried it might not have enough air to last through the competition. “I thought there was a lot of good ideas (here),” Cobb said, admitting she didn’t think she had a chance to win. Zachary McLaughlin, a ninth-grader who took top honors in the high school division, used a $10 Mylar balloon that was so light in weigh-ins that he had to add a rock to get some sort of weight. “I just wanted to make it fall as slow as possible,” McLaughlin said. He made one crucial tweak to the original design from what he first thought: seat belts for the egg. McLaughlin’s contraption floated the 31 feet and preserved the egg, scoring big points for its lightweight design and small number of parts. When it came time to get a grand prize winner, however, McLaughlin’s egg cracked on the first try. “(I should have) taped the door,” he said afterward. “That’s what killed me.” McLaughlin said he’s already looking at ITT Technical Institute. His sister Celia took third in the middle school division. Contest winners were based on egg survival, package weight and part count, and drop accuracy. Each of the grade-level winners took home a $1,000 scholarship while second-place winners were each awarded a $750 scholarship; third-place winners took home a $500 scholarship. The goal of the event, foundation president Dick Hughes said, was to, “inspire the kids in the elementary schools all the way through the higher grades to go into math, go into sciences ? (and) ultimately become mathematicians and scientists we need.” Sponsors of the SEF Engineering Challenge included the Albert Haller Foundation, Westport Shipyard, Sequim Alumni Association, the Gumby Scholarship Fund, High Energy Metals Inc., Tarciscio’s Italian Place Restaurant, Wal-Mart of Sequim, Quadra Engineering Inc., Albert Friess, Jon Jack, Sequim Sunrise Rotary, Peninsula Ad Works and the Boys & Girls Club in Sequim. The foundation is a nonprofit public charity established to inspire Sequim public school students to succeed in all areas of their lives, managed by an unpaid volunteer board of directors. SEF Engineering Challenge Egg Drop winners
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