And so, Saturday, April 11, the students gathered in a field off Burnt Mill Drive to watch their teacher ascend into the sky in a helicopter to drop their final projects to the earth.
The logistics of dropping items out of a helicopter and keeping the spectators safe were highly controlled, Giacomelli explained afterwards, and she said she was grateful to pilot Ken McGee for donating his services.
The project had several parameters, she said. The structure could measure no more than eight inches in height, width and depth and no parachutes were allowed. Other than that, the students could use any materials they wanted.
The sixth, seventh and eight graders had divided into groups of two, three or four to complete the challenge. They worked together for weeks to brainstorm materials and structure design.
“It was interesting because immediately they think of soft stuff,” Giacomelli said, “and I kept telling them…you have this huge impact, so something needs to absorb that shock, so then they started going to a mixture of hard and soft things.”
The contraption created by 11-year-old Emma Johnson’s group looked deceptively simple. But inside the box were layers of materials carefully selected by the four sixth graders.
“We had bubble wrap on the inside,” she said, “and then we mixed packing peanuts with marshmallows and made that the filling. Then we took two bags of peanut butter and rubber banded them around the egg.”
Cornstarch, carwash sponges and Styrofoam were some of the other materials utilized by the various groups.
The students watched Giacomelli hovering 150 feet in the air, tossing their projects into the field below. They groaned as one project splattered on impact, and cheered as another project had so much buoyancy it skittered across the grass after landing.
After gathering the remnants of the projects, Giacomelli let each group open their contraption and reveal whether the egg had broken. She said when she previously assigned this project at another school, many of the eggs cracked, so she was surprised as, one by one, WAAS students pulled intact eggs out of their packaging. In all, 11 of the 15 eggs survived the fall.
“Now, they’re probably going to say to me, we need to go higher!” she laughed afterwards.
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