Egg Drop STEM Challenge: Guided Design Challenge Booklet

This download contains a ready-to-print booklet to guide your students through an egg drop experiment. The experiment, which will take several class periods/time blocks to complete, emphasizes the engineering design process, properties of materials, and math (budgets and money computation). The pack can be used in its entirety or you could pick and choose the pieces that will be relevant or useful for your students.

The following pages/steps are included in this booklet:

1. “Eggs-amining” an Egg: Students examine an egg and then record key details about it, including its height, width, and circumference; color; and the properties that describe their egg.

2. “Eggs-amining” the Possibilities: Students consider the properties of materials that would be useful for protecting an egg during a drop, identify the properties for various materials that will be available to them during the construction of their egg-protecting device, and then rank the available materials in terms of their utility for protecting an egg.

3. How to Protect an Egg: Students brainstorm, draw, and write about at least 3 design ideas that they have for a device to protect their egg.

4. A Most “Eggs-ellent” Design: Students evaluate the design ideas from the “How to Protect an Egg” stage, and then choose the design that they will try to construct.

5. Buying Your Materials: Students fill out a supply order sheet to buy the materials that they will need to build their design. Students must stay under a $20.00 budget.

6. Will Your Egg Survive?: After building their designs, students predict what will happen during the egg drop. Students also look at other students’ designs and think about what other ideas they see that might be very effective for protecting an egg.

7. Was Your Design All That It Was “Cracked Up” to Be?: Following the egg drop, students reflect on what happened and think about what changes they might make if they could repeat the activity.

A brief teachers' guide is also included.

This work by Nicole Hewes is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.