To the loser the spoils...

Adam and I have been guiding the Interns through a Creative Week this week. A lot of problem solving, lateral thinking exercises, and examples from life of how imaginitive thinking can often produce startling results.
One of the projects we did was called Eggs Crash Benedict. The aim was, in 45 min, using only a piece of A4 paper, a piece of A4 card, a short length of string, a rubber band and a paper clip, to design a structure that would protect an egg from breaking when dropped from the roof of a building.
Well, everyone including the children, got thinking, designing and making, coming up with quite incredible structures... strips of paper and card rolled into coils and packed around the egg and held in place by rubber bands [360 degree crumple zone], to a basket and parachute, to an 'icecream cone' contraption with the egg suspended in the top [slowing the fall], to a toilet roll kind of thing that held the egg in the middle in suspension, and Zoe's... which was just a messy christmas-wrapping kind of setup.
Well, at the appointed time - afternoon tea, when all the conference delegates where on hand to view and cheer - we made our way out onto the balcony of the dining room. One by one, Adam introduced the contraptions and their contraptors, and proceeded to 'test' them by dropping them to a target zone below.
One by one, the crowd cheered in anticipation, and oohhhed in condolence as we made more and more a raw scrambled egg mix on the pavement below. I must confess, after being very confident of my magnificent fluted, parachuted, triple crumple-zoned and rubber band-suspended egg nobel prize winning creation, mine too joined the congealing mass of broken yolk and albumen in the target zone. It may have been my imagination, but I think the crowd's grief was longer and more despairing at the oozing of my broken magnificence... I had promised so much... they had believed.... alas.

Zoe's was one of the last, and Adam held the poor thing momentarily aloft, before releasing the string. It dropped. It dropped. We held each other's breath. It meet the ground in silence. It made a sound unlike like others.... everyone raced over to it and pawed at the wrapping, wanting, hoping, willing that it would be whole.... IT WAS.... we have a WINNER!

Zoe fairly leapt into the air with the cheers of the crowd lifting her to olympian heights. Much cheering, thigh-slapping, and 'I never expected that' -ing. I nearly wept with the very joy of it.

A 6 year old girl. Caution to the wind. Physics and engineering be damned. Just wrap it.

[Oh, by the way, there was another winner, though he doesn't count. Pempa. He's an adult, and he's from Tibet. And he's not my fantastic daughter.]