This year in science we did a heat shield project. The project went like this: your job was to create an effective heat shield to protect an egg from a blowtorch for three minutes. You got a certain amount of ‘credits’ which was imaginary money, and you had to stay under budget. Each material cost a certain amount of credits. You also had to stay under a thickness limit of 3 cm.

Everybody was placed into random groups of three. Then each of us were assigned one of three jobs; Materials Master, All Star Analyst, and Challenge Captain. Once that was divided, we made our test heat shields. Everybody tried lots of different ideas. Some worked, most didn’t. In the end, my group had two successful prototypes. To test, we used a heat gun instead of a blowtorch and instead of an egg, we just took temperatures.

For the final test, we combined our successful prototypes and prayed like crazy it would work. One group’s shield caught on fire, and one just melted. By the time it was time for ours, we were convinced it would fail. But lo and behold, it WORKED! Our shield, (which had been named babygorral [not a typo]) had protected our egg, Kevin. (Named after Kelvin Units) So we won and got one million totally-real-and-not-fake-at-all dollars on a big check. It rocked. Plus we learned a lot about how certain materials prevent heat, and some spread it.