Creative Crash Test Cars

How does mass affect momentum in a head-on collision? Students explore this question and experience the open-ended engineering design process as if they are the next-generation engineers working on the next big safety feature for passenger vehicles. They are challenged to design or improve an existing passenger compartment design/feature so that it better withstands front-end collisions, protecting riders from injury and resulting in minimal vehicle structural damage. With a raw egg as the test passenger, teams use teacher-provided building materials to add their own safety features onto either a small-size wooden car kit or their own model cars created from scratch. They run the prototypes down ramps into walls, collecting distance and time data, slo-mo video of their crash tests, and damage observations. They make calculations and look for relationships between car mass, speed, momentum and the amount of crash damage. A guiding worksheet and pre/post-quiz are included.