IET Great Egg Race 2012 … A cracking competition

The IET (Institution of Engineering and Technology) held the Southampton leg of its annual Great Egg Race in the Mountbatten Building this week. This year's challenge was one of the toughest yet.

Teams of competitors had to work out how to pick up an egg off the floor, transport it across a table and deposit it back on the floor on the other side - without damaging the egg in the process.

Six teams took up the challenge of safely transporting the egg. They teams had two hours and a selection of items to use. Amongst these were an electric motor, elastic bands, balsa wood, a plastic cup, thread, a cotton reel, pins and rubber grommets plus tape and blu-tack.

A surprise team from Southampton Solent University emerged at about 40 minutes in, having got lost on the way to the event, this took the total competing teams up to 7.

Throughout the event the teams were assessed by judges on teamwork, communication, design, creativity and quality of the finished product.

The final eggstraordinary contraptions varied greatly across the teams: some adhering more closely to the original requirements whilst others had more free-ranged thinking.

Each team was asked to demonstrate and eggsplain their design to the judges and other competitors with points being awarded by each of the judges.

Despite the difficulty of the challenge all of the teams were able to submit at least a partly working design that could transport the egg (including the Solent team in just over half the time) even if the designs needed a few helping pushes or tweaks along the way.