Every year, the Brno University of Technology organises a children’s university for pupils and students of primary schools and junior high schools. Each month, BUT Junior is hosted by one of the university’s faculties. The aim of the event is to motivate kids to study technical fields. In November, the students of the children’s university arrived at the Faculty of Mechanical Engineering.

Kids were introduced to the topic of passive aircraft safety by experts from the Institute of Aerospace Engineering. The research carried out at BAANG was also presented, of course in a simple and entertaining way. The theoretical part was followed by a practical task: to design, build and test their own passive protection system and save a raw egg falling from a height to the hard ground. The teams were able to test their engineering solutions in the institute’s test room.

“My colleague František Löffelmann and I approached the topic of passive safety in a practical manner. Initially, we presented the general principles such as energy absorption, deformation zones, and thin-walled structures. Then, we tasked the pupils to apply these concepts practically through the “Drop Egg Challenge.” Despite the topic seems complex, this approach allowed us to skip any calculations or simulations and directly validate the proposed designs through drop tests,” says researcher and memeber of the BAANG project team Pavel Zikmund.