Cobb Reporter

Lovett School issued the following announcement on Jan. 24. 

Way back in October, Intro to Engineering students were tasked with a momentous and potentially life-altering challenge: mail a Pringle, via the United States Postal Service, to Florida without it breaking. 

It’s a project that Pringle mailing expert Mr. Greenberg has been assigning to his students on and off for about fifteen years. He originally assigned it to help physics students put concepts of forces, impulses, and momentum into practice, but he decided to take a new approach to the challenge this fall when he started teaching Intro to Engineering. Now, engineering students get to have a (ahem) crack at figuring out how not to crack a potato chip. 

The basics of the project were pretty simple: build a contraption to hold an original Pringle, document your experimentation process, and mail your final apparatus through USPS First Class mail to Mr. Greenberg’s brother’s house, where he would visit over Thanksgiving break and determine which lucky Pringles survived the 630-mile journey. 

This year, engineering students also had much more challenging design constraints than did physics students of yore. We had to choose three of these four restrictions to follow while making our contraptions: no adhesives, no plastics, no pre-fabricated containers, and no cotton products.

To most engineering students, including me, this did not exactly sound easy, or appealing. 

“I thought it was weird and that my Pringle was going to get moldy in the mail,” says freshman Talen Frett about his first impressions of the project. Like just about everyone else in the class, he was pretty skeptical about how a Pringle could make the journey across state lines unscathed. 

As everyone got to work, we came to understand everything that this project entailed: coming up with dynamic designs, trying different materials, and testing prototypes by crushing them and dropping them down staircases. 

“I began to realize how much of a struggle it would become to get a fragile food from one place to the other,” says sophomore Holly Smith as she recalls the prototyping process. 

Personally, I tried out all sorts of ways to shield a Pringle from the dangers of the postal service. I experimented with several forms of cotton products, built many types of boxes out of cardboard and paper, and slammed my prototypes into the concrete sidewalk to test their effectiveness. 

Many pringles were harmed in the process of designing my final contraption: a Pringle blanketed in layers of cotton rounds inside a paper origami box surrounded by paper shreds inside a hand-constructed cardboard box. 

Then, on November 18, 2021 I drove to the United States Postal service, prayed the Hail Mary, and shipped my beloved Pringle to Florida. 

The week after Thanksgiving, engineering students returned to class eager to hear the fate of our Pringles only to learn that their destinies had not yet been determined (Schrodinger’s Pringle?). Mr. Greenberg had to make the last-minute decision not to travel to Florida for the break, so instead of opening them up on Thanksgiving Day, his brother shipped them all back to Atlanta to be evaluated here. 

So, life went on as we waited for our Pringles to return home. We worked in class on making bridges out of toothpicks and wiring circuits, trying not to agonize over our potato chips.

Finally, two weeks later, on Monday, December 13, my Pringle mechanism was opened, and my Pringle was found to be unscathed. 

But not all Pringles were so fortunate. Out of the 22 Pringles shipped to Florida (and back) between the two sections of Intro to Engineering, 8 did not survive. A memorial service was held for the fallen Pringles, and their former owners learned a valuable lesson about Pringle engineering.

Original source can be found here.

Source: Lovett School