Why the egg drop should go away.

This week the new science standards were posted for 2nd round review.  I looked through the ones relevant to high school physics, and for the most part, was pretty happy.  Their is a high focus on process over curriculum, in fact, the only curriculum stuff (partially because physics isn't taken by many high school students) was forces, energy and optics.  There is also an engineering section which overlaps the physics stuff by quite a bit.  The one thing that left me disappointed was the codification of a force-minimization build project, e.g. the egg drop.

If by some chance you don't know what the egg drop project is it is an ubiquitous (at least in american schools) competition where students build a container to place an egg in, and then drop it from either a predetermined height, of from ever increasing height until it breaks.  I have never included it as part of my curriculum and have no plans to ever do so for several reasons:

First, it's so common that one can easily copy some other design, receive their passing grade, and be done with it.  As such, learning anything isn't necessary to be successful. There is no needed analysis, and thus it is more appropriate for a middle school course.
Second, there are a wide variety of commercial products designed to minimize forces already, as packaging for shipping requires this.
Third, it doesn't address any sort of legitimate problem,requiring new ideas/materials.  Granted, a lot of build projects don't require innovation, but this should be our goal.  Ideally, a project should address a larger issue.

There are so many projects better suited to high school level physics course:
cars powered by solar cells
self designed and built electric motors
Optimizing energy capture (trebuchets, mousetrap/balloon powered vehicles)
Musical instrument design
Rubber band powered helicopters
Passive Solar heaters

Science Olympiad does good job with their build competitions.  Last year they had the following:

Gravity cart - cart travels down a ramp and coasts a specific distance, not known in advance
Keep the Heat - Hot water (temp and mass not known in advance) is placed in your insulated box for a set time (no known in advance) and you must predict the final temperature of the water.
Music instrument - Students perform a duet on two self-made instruments of a specific song set in advance, and a song that they choose.
Rubber band helicopter - Keeping aloft a Michelangelo styled design of  a helicopter using a rubber band for power.

Examples like these tend to require an understanding of how a device functions, interface of modular systems, sourcing of or re-adaptation of specialized and common materials, and budgeting to keep costs under control in a much more appropriate way for high school students than the egg drop.  In other words, they are better ways of teaching the engineering design process.

For an example of the sort of designing that could be happening at the high school level, that has a larger purpose consider the following:

Transportation of drinking water.
Clean drinking water
Replacing kerosene lamps and battery powered lights
removing oil from water

I'm not saying high school students should be expected to develop these exact projects, but it's pretty easy to  create a project based around thinking about these issues and their possible solutions.  The first three are expected to be very inexpensive, so they would likely fit within school budget restrictions.

By getting kids involved with design in a way that directly extends beyond the classroom, it is far more likely that they will see engineering design as an everyday useful process rather than something they just did sometime in the past that was fun at the time.