Strong Spaghetti– Get out the pasta and test our your spaghetti bridge designs. Which one will hold the most weight? We did love that clean-up was a snap with our eggs in the bag! The eggs and bags that didn’t make it went right to the trash, and the other materials were easily put away. Although we taped the bag with water in it, it still got things a bit wet! Understanding how structures are used to protect products is an important part of the new GCSE courses in Design and Technology and Engineering. Structures are used to protect many products, ranging from eggs to supplies dropped from aircraft during emergencies. Make sure you have some spare eggs, in case any of the teams break theirs while trying to protect it.

Which ideas worked best to improve the accuracy of the device in landing close to the target? Why did they work? Design "something" that will protect your egg, which represents fragile relief supplies, so it survives the air drops. Brainstorming is a group problem-solving design process in which each person in the group presents his or her ideas in an open forum. An understanding of the concepts of energy transfer, conservation of energy, potential energy and kinetic energy, as presented in the Move It! associated lesson. Define the criteria and constraints of a design problem with sufficient precision to ensure a successful solution, taking into account relevant scientific principles and potential impacts on people and the natural environment that may limit possible solutions.EDP Step 1: Ask to Identify the Needs and Constraints. Inform students that engineers solve problems by first identifying the design requirements and constraints. For this design challenge, the requirements and constraints are: Students may accidently break their eggs when building their devices. Implement a small penalty for the first infraction, perhaps a loss of time or materials, as well as the task to clean up the mess.

Introduce the engineering design process by showing the students the image below, or write out the seven steps in a circle on the board. Explain that engineers use the engineering design process to solve problems and that the process is iterative and helps then learn from failure. Do you know what natural disasters are? Have you ever experienced one? (Listen to student responses). Natural disasters are natural events like floods, earthquakes, and hurricanes that cause significant damage and sometimes even loss of life. These natural disasters can make basic human needs like food, water, and shelter inaccessible due to compromised infrastructure. If your egg survives this fall, how high do you think an egg can be dropped from without breaking? How could you improve your design to make it more effective? The kids were super excited to take part in the egg drop project, and one student even suggested we do it again later in the year taking into account what we learned from the current egg drop challenge. I’m sure we’ll be doing it again soon! They then took their contraptions outside to test them out. My husband climbed onto the school roof with all the egg containers and dropped them one at at time. Since this is the highest we’ve done the egg drop challenge compared to years past, there were quite a few broken eggs this time!Strong Paper– Experiment with folding paper in different ways to test its strength, and learn about what shapes make the strongest structures. These supplies must reach designated landing areas accurately and intact. When things do not go as planned, bags of food can burst from the impact, and sometimes supplies completely miss the target landing areas. (Read aloud to students a 1994 news article about emergency food airdrops that landed off target in Zaire.) Paper Bridges– Similar to our strong spaghettti challenge. Design a paper bridge with folded paper. Which one will hold the most coins? Hight - your contraption must protect an egg from a drop of 15ft. However, the higher the drop your construction will survive, the more points you'll receive in this category.

Kids were instructed to bring in materials from home for their egg contraptions.This year we changed the rules up a bit and eliminated a few materials the kids usually use in their egg contraptions- no boxes and no battery powered items. If dropping from a height such as a second story window, be sure to maintain proper supervision of students near the window. For greatest safety on higher drops, have only the teacher drop the eggs. Activity Sheet - Children can use this to help guide their design choices. It includes a handy space where they can draw out their design before attempting to make it. It even has plenty of prompt questions to help them improve their design. Your engineering challenge today is to apply what you know about the engineering design process and energy (potential, kinetic, conservation of energy) to attempt to solve this real-life problem by testing techniques for dropping precious supplies (hold up an egg), as represented by a fragile raw egg, accurately and safely from a designated height. Let's get started!We learned that there is no best way to protect an egg. There are multiple ways to do the egg drop successfully. What egg drop design ideas will you come up with? Straw Boats Challenge– Design a boat made from nothing but straws and tape, and see how many items it can hold before it sinks. Standard Egg Drop: Start with the classic challenge where students must design a contraption to protect a raw egg from breaking when dropped from a certain height. They can experiment with different materials and shapes for their protective devices. Give each student team the same amount of materials to build their devices. Suggested supplies are listed below, but feel free to be creative in what materials you make available. Scissors are the only tool they need. The activity sheet includes teacher notes, guidance, useful web links, and links (where appropriate) to the national curriculum in each of the four devolved UK nations; England, Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales.

Energy Questions: Ask students to explain how energy is transferred when the egg is released until it impacts the ground. The importance of this question is to connect the material from this engineering design activity to the associated lesson on types of mechanical energy. Cover the material in the lesson either before or after the activity. Spaghetti Marshmallow Tower– Build the tallest spaghetti tower that can hold the weight of a jumbo marshmallow.

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Children will be required to select six different materials to wrap around an egg and predict which one will be the best at protecting the egg. Design Evaluations: Listen to student descriptions of their devices and results. How well did students design their devices for different drops? Do they understand what worked and what didn't? Perhaps most importantly, do they understand why particular designs did not work? An Egg Drop Challenge Display Banner - Wether you're doing this activity at home or in the classroom, this banner is perfect for setting the mood and helping children to get into the right headspace for the lesson.