QBoy found a small pail and thought it would be a good container for his egg. My kids got to work right away building their contraptions. “As long as you keep trying, you haven’t failed.” “The only way you fail is if you give up,” I stated. “Or do you learn from the experience to build a better contraption?” “What if it’s an epic failure?” my son asked. But they were still up for the challenge. Although they were a bit nervous when I told them the egg would be raw, not hard boiled. So on a recent afternoon I gave my kids a challenge: Build a contraption for an egg that will prevent it from cracking when dropped from a tall height. If you want to teach your children and students to think like scientists, you’ll find plenty of creative and innovative ways to develop their scientific thinking inside this book. The egg drop challenge is just one of more than 50 activities in a fabulous new book called STEAM Kids. In this post I am sharing a fun egg drop challenge I did with my kids to help them practice their scientific thinking.
You can download the design sheet for free at the bottom of this post.ĭon’t assume others’ successful ideas will automatically work for you. Use the design process worksheet to help you. Lessons we learned from the egg drop challenge project design processįocus on the design process, instead of result. The key idea of a successful straw structure for egg drop project, from physics point of view, is to find a design that the straw will divert or absorb most of the forces, thus little force goes to the egg. The egg stayed as a whole, not even a crack! We made sure that each long straw extends out of the cube vertexes at a different length. Then long straws are glued along each side of the cube. The center is a small cube to fit the egg. Third Egg drop design with Straw – Unbalanced Cubeīased on our analysis on the 2nd failure, a 3rd design was made. When only one straw is bearing the force, most of the force moves along the direction of the straw, thus little goes to the egg. The longest will be the one holding the force when it hits the ground. This way each side has 4 straws sticking out. The solution is to use a cube shape as the core to hold the egg. RELATED: Successful Egg Drop Project Design with Paper and Straw Although these crossing straws are not straightly parallel to the ground, they still push the egg when it lands on the ground. As we learned in geometry, 3 points form a plane, this means the landing force are equally distributed among the 3 straws, and then transfer to the crossing straws connecting these 3.
Because, with this core shape, the landing side is usually with 3 straws sticking out. We analyzed the causes again, and realized that pyramid is not a good shape to start with.
Second Egg drop design with Straw – Unbalanced Pyramidīased on the learning from the first failed experiment, we did a 2nd design to make sure all extension straws sticking out of the pyramid vertexes with a different length. With this realization, we started the next design. These parallel straws must have hit the egg hard. This makes the connecting straws parallel to the ground. One thing we noticed was when the egg dropped to the ground, the side that landed on the ground was on 3 straws with the same length sticking out the 3 vertexes. After the failure, we discussed the reasons.