The Egg Drop Challenge develops a multitude of skills including problem solving, resilience, teamwork and communication.  Working in teams of four to encourage discussion and questioning while ensuring that every child has plenty of opportunities to take part, your students are challenged to prevent a raw egg from breaking when it’s dropped from a height.  We start by discussing the forces of gravity and air resistance, in a way that is appropriate to the ages of your students, before thinking about the properties of materials by looking at the limited resources that each group has to complete the challenge.  Your children will make initial predictions about which of their resources will slow the fall of the egg most effectively, then we’ll test each one.

Children will then create their own designs, focussing on their priorities that they’ll need to agree together as a group, before building and testing their egg saving contraptions. KS2 groups will annotate their designs as they make changes, allowing opportunities to discuss the engineering design process and the importance of continual testing and adaptation.

The workshop ends with testing each design and reflecting, in a way suitable for the age and stage of the children taking part, on the characteristics of the designs which contribute to success or to broken eggs!

Curriculum links:

• Key Stage 1 Programme of Study: Working scientifically
• Year 1 Programme of Study: Everyday materials
• Year 2 Programme of Study: Uses of everyday materials
• Lower Key Stage 2 Programme of Study: Working scientifically
• Upper Key Stage 2 Programme of Study: Working scientifically
• Year 5 Programme of Study: Forces
• PRIMARY National Curriculum – Design and technology

Documents:

• Risk Assessment for Egg Drop Challenge

Contact our schools team with any questions on [email protected]