CPM Class and the Great Egg Drop

As many of you may know, I have been taking this Certified Public Manager (CPM) course for about 6 months now. The course is a program for state employees that teaches them management skills. It is a three module course, with each module consisting of 12 weeks of 8-10 hour classes once a week. At first the classes were a pain and seemed to only cause me to be more behind at work each week (reducing my four day work week into three days); but I have met some amazing people in these classes and made some good friends. I am almost through the second module and yesterday in class, we began talking about Marketing and Promotion. As part of the project, we were assigned to create a contraption for an egg to make the egg withstand an 8-foot drop. The only items we could use were 20 plastic straws and 30 inches of masking tape. We then had to come up with a name and marketing strategy for the device. This was a really fun project, especially with my group.

Our design was called EggNik and consisted of wrapping some of the straws around the egg and then weaving the remaining straws through the openings to create "crumple-free impact zones" around the egg. Here is my group with our design....

From left to right, me, Rod, Craig, Pam, Lesley and Ming

We were so proud of our design and out of the four groups competing, only two groups' design withstood the 8 foot drop (ours was one of them). We then decided to kick it up a notch and see if it could take a 20 foot drop....neither egg survived, but we attributed our design failure to the fact that the crumple free impact zones had been compromised during the initial drop. Still, it was a fun day and I look forward to moving on to module 3 with this group, which consists of a 12-week long state project.

Long live EggNik (at least in our hearts, anyway)!