When physics students at Mariemont High School were asked to drop a bare egg off the second floor into the main hub, the custodial staff may have been a bit nervous.
But thanks in part to Jeff Radloff and Brad Murphy’s teachings, students managed to keep the eggs whole when they landed.
“This is an engineering project we do in physics,” said Radloff. “The goal is to engineer a structure that will protect the egg from breaking as it lands from the second floor to the first floor.”
The project, which for years had students building a structure around the egg as it fell, saw ingenuity and creativity in the projects, Radloff said.
“With the big change this year in the project, I’ve seen different things used this year than in the other 30 years of doing this project. They used creative ingredients, and created ways to have layers to physically move around the egg to slow it down.”
One of the more creative and successful projects belonged to Caitlin, a senior at Mariemont who used boiled noodles.
“We took a ton of noodles,” she said. “We did not think it was going to work, but then it did. I think the noodles were soft enough to soften the blow and trapped air pockets within them. I think I learned to be more open minded.”
Radloff added he wanted to allow students to use design thinking to be creative and build something that could be functional.
“We’re learning to create something that is new, while relying on the concepts that we’ve learned about in class,” the physics teacher said. “But they are actually doing something with it -- selecting the ingredients for the structure and focus on critical thinking in building a structure."