Our latest Studiothink team competition is the time-tested favorite of grade school kids everywhere: an egg drop contest. For those of you not familiar with the term, it's a competition where contestants must create an egg container that, when dropped from a high elevation onto the hard ground below, will keep the egg inside from breaking.

Talk of wonderous flying machines, brightly-coloured parachutes, and questionable physics filled the office as we all considered the best and, most importantly, coolest way to deliver our eggs safely and securely to the office floor. As these things often go, time got the better of us and, while we couldn't physically manifest the egg-drop vessel of our dreams, we definitely made a decent effort.

Mine was the DaVinci-inspired parachute made from bamboo and rubber bands (far left in the image). Unfortunately my egg didn't survive, teaching us all a valuable lesson about the importance of wearing a seat belt.

Rob's was a bungee-seat inside a bucket he made that morning. His clever idea of encasing the egg in a single cutout of egg carton kept his egg alive.

What Chandra's egg-drop device lacked in creativity it made up for in practicality - her Disney princess bag stuffed with air bags cushioned her egg from the impact and it, too, survived.

Finally, believing strongly in the creed, "If you're going to fail, fail spectacularly," Mike sent a hockey water bottle filled with pancake syrup and water careening to the earth, his egg taped over a thin line of toilet paper covering the bottle's mouth. The idea, I guess, was that the contraption would hit the ground, the egg would continue to fall, burst through the thin paper and plunk into his syrupy solution, safe and sound. Unfortunately for Mike (and anyone standing within 13 feet or so of ground zero), the bottle slammed to the ground, firing a fountain of pancake syrup, water, and egg throughout the office. Fail spectacularly, indeed.

In the end, by unanimous decision, Rob was declared the winner of the egg drop and won a nifty new Nerf gun to store at his desk and wield against unsuspecting co-workers. Congratulations on your victory, Rob, and since you're newly armed, let me take this opportunity to say that I've always liked you best.