Science Buddies: "Ask an Expert"

I am coaching for the straw egg drop project in which we are allowed to only use 20 straws 1 meter of masking tape and the tape may not touch the egg. I have tried many differnet designs but the egg keeps on cracking any ideas beacause the science olympiad is on May 14,2011!!!!!!!!!HELP!!!!!

What failure analysis have you done? Have you used a video camera recording at its highest frames per second rate pointed at the impact point and looked at the images frame by frame?

The key to improving most faulty designs is ususally to understand the failure mechanism.