The great egg drop challenge
Ever wonder what happens when two objects collide? Welcome to the Great Egg Drop Challenge!
Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to design a protection system to get a raw egg safely to the ground from a free fall of 7 feet high onto a flat, hard surface, such as concrete, tile or laminate.
Bounce or Break? the ultimate egg drop challenge!
Revised in 2024 with even MORE fun and science!
Grab my full experiment PDF FREE by becoming a VIP subscriber! Includes:
- experiment guide & data sheets
- a list of the videos for each experiment with interactive links
- + the science behind the experiment!
If you are under 13, please ask a parent or guardian to help.
Egg Drop - Crash test Dummy challenge
This is a fun twist to a classic Egg Drop Challenge… can you come up with a good crash test dummy substitute to work with while developing your egg drop protection system?
Think about this for a minute. Crash test dummies are often used in the design process to get useful information in a safer manner, and/or at less expense. What would you like your fresh egg substitute to do, and why?
- Predict whether your fresh egg will crack (good pass/fail test predictor)?
- Allow you to test and build several crash protection systems more easily, without wasting eggs?
Don’t watch the second video until you’ve come up with some crash test dummy options of your own! There are no failures here, just opportunities to learn! I share some of the options I considered, and how they worked for me.
Please share your results by submitting a photo of your work at the bottom of this page. Then continue with the Great Egg Drop Challenge (see the section just below)!
Teaser intro video... 40 seconds
slow motion egg drop - breaking egg - 43 sec
Egg drop experiment demo, incl. slo-mo - 5:25
Gravity Drop, PE, KE, damage - 1:58
outside the box experiment - 1:51
The Great Egg Drop Challenge
Ever wonder what happens when two objects collide? Welcome to the Great Egg Drop Challenge! Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to design a protection system to get a raw egg safely to the ground from a free fall of 7 feet high onto a flat, hard surface, such as concrete, tile or laminate.
Materials needed:
- A few raw or hard-boiled eggs
- HIGHLY RECOMMENDED: plastic ziplock sandwich bags (or similar… so your broken eggs don’t cause a mess)
Some potential outer frameworks:
- Plastic straws & tape
- Plastic food container with lid
- Cardboard box
- Large ziplock plastic bag
- Part of a plastic bottle, plastic wrap & tape
- Masking tape and/or duct tape to seal your system
Potential cushioning materials:
- Balloons & string
- Sponges
- Cotton balls
- Pop corn
- Styrofoam
- Insulation foam board
- Crumpled paper
- Shredded paper
- Bubble wrap
- Rubber bands & tape (& carrier of some sort, such as single egg carton cell, small inner box, etc.)
- Plastic grocery bags, wadded up
- Cotton quilt batting remnants
- Foam remnant
- Aluminum foil
- Anything else you can think of that you have around the house and are willing to donate to the experiment. Think outside the box and get creative! How about a hang-glider?
Videos at left include:
- Teaser intro video
- Slow motion capture of egg drop… check out the impact zone!
- Three Egg Drop tests, plus information about mass, spring, and damper systems… which do you think provides the best protection?
- Gravity drop, potential energy, kinetic energy, and damage
- An “outside-the-box” egg drop test!
- The full “Great Egg Drop Experiment” – ~35 minutes… sample tests, plus demos on gravity drop, potential energy, kinetic energy, and damage… VIDEO is just BELOW!
Download the experiment PDF here for more details!