Egg Drop guidance

[Drew Hoffos]

Hi friends! First time coach here for Eggstrawdinary.

I'm looking for some guidance on the rough number of straws and tape our kids will be given. 

Obviously I know it changes every year. But when having them practice it would be helpful to know in years past, were the number of straws closer to 10 or 30? 

Tape? 6" or  a meter? 

And are the straws always full size? Or is it possible they will give shorter ones? 

Thanks for the help! 

Drew

[Larry Hsieh]

Last year for SoCal Egg Drop Rules listed the specific materials like 1 meter tape, 3m of string, etc... This year the rules don't specify, maybe to make it easier for the host sites to gather the material but I do agree it makes it hard to plan and practice.

I would reach out to your regional directors or the organizing tournament directors who are organizing to ask for clarification. Even within local competitions last year how Egg Drop was done in the three different comps were completely different.

I do have the feeling that Division A is suppose to be less competitive for the kids, so maybe the rules this time around are intentionally vague so kids don't over engineer their practices but more learning the process of given this "stuff" and what science principals you know what can you build like MacGyver (totally dating myself here - lol).

Last year there were no straws think it may have been that way 3 years ago.

Builds in general can be quite random on the results, ask any build teams that went to USC on Saturday there are just things you can never predict and that's part of the fun/frustration and learning for the kids. Who would think that the air vents would be on and cause the kids' helicopters to head out the classroom and into the hallway (sigh). In Division A, I find it even more random. Balloon Racer last year was just so unpredictable event that I might has went to Vegas to guess the outcome. My take-away yes prepare the kids but don't have them over engineer it cause sometimes it won't matter and there's just stuff out of their control. 

If you're in SoCal we have a small Div A Elementary Coach network with 6 - 7 schools across LA, OC, and SD county where we just share notes and ideas as well as working on a creating a test pool -- similar to the Captain's Test Exchange in Division C that the high-schoolers do but it's specific to SoCal Div A since Div A is sooo regional that the information and events are quite different across the country.

Best of luck!

-larry

Westpark Elementary Scioly

larry.west...@gmail.com