Pine Cones, Tennis Balls, and Clorox Wipes?

So it's been a while since it was assigned, but as for what I did Wednesday and Thursday in Science Class:

It all started with a simple dream I had Tuesday night. Looking back on it I think it had something to do with my dog and I playing fetch with pine cones that afternoon but anyway, that night I had a dream in which I was watching pine cones fall. Their odd rounded conical shaped torpedoed to the ground, yet the seeds inside stayed intact. This dream inspired me in more than one way, in one way it made me open my eyes to the facts: over the past 100 or so years scientists have turned to the natural world around them when they were stumped. It's the truth.
When the Wright brothers built their first plane they looked at how birds fly or glide through the sky. When engineers they design speedy-sports cars nowadays they look at how Cheetahs' sleek bodies move over their terrain. So with that in mind Wednesday morning I went out in my backyard and studied a few pine cones.

In case you have never seen a pine cone before, the design is simple but effective. Pine cones are basically a rounded bullet-like shape with lots of holes and crevices on the outside, like a golf ball. On one MythBusters episode they did likewise to a car:

They found that it made a minuscule difference to it's fuel efficiency, but it did make a difference. In the end they compared a golf ball to a regular rounded ball and explained the aerodynamics were different.

So based on that information what did I do Wednesday and Thursday?
Why I dimpled our container design of course!
After asking my classmates where I might find tennis balls- Mary Grace, Nora and I headed to the tennis courts where we then got on our hands and knees and (very glamorously) crawled under the bushes where we found the tennis balls.
Please allow me to explain something before I continue: we did not know that what we were doing was "wrong," by the looks of the area under the bushes (full of prickly vines and leaf debris) no one had collected the tennis balls for years. But even then we didn't take them all! We took a few, yes, but there are still countless others buried under years of decaying leaves. And as for any of the Tennis coaches who may read this in the future: you can have them back! I only used about four-or-so and most of those I used were gray from use and sun-bleaching. Feel free to take back the others that were not used.

Anyway back to business:
I chose tennis balls for the substance I would use to cover the container with for quite a few reasons. One was that tennis balls are basically invincible. (Like my classmates and I learned latter on when we tried [with no avail] to cut them open.) Another was that their rubbery shell would absorb some of the shock from our container's impact with Earth. The last was that tennis balls are simply amazing. They are the only balls that come to mind when I think of neon-colored sports gear and they are incredibly durable.
So had you been in my 4th period science class Wednesday and Thursday you would have watched this idea of mine come to life before your eyes. You would have also probably laughed as you watched 8th graders try to cut tennis balls in half with safety scissors and duct-tape them onto an barely distinguishable Clorox Wipe container.