Egg Drop Challenge

Have you heard of the egg drop challenge? My daughter has been begging to do it for months. I don’t know why we didn’t do it sooner. Well, I do. I thought it was going to make a giant mess that I would end up cleaning up but I was totally wrong. It was basically no mess at all. I will even say this Egg Drop Challenge was so much fun! Try this egg drop project with preschool, pre k, kindergarten, first grade, 2nd grade, 3rd grade, and 4th grade students for a fun, hands-on science project for kids.

Egg Drop Challenge

So what is the Egg Drop Challenge? Basically, you create a contraption with the intention of keeping the egg safe. You put an egg inside your contraption and drop from a high distance, we did a 6 foot ladder. There are so many options for what your contraption can be made of, the options are endless, and this is what makes it fun. There are so many possible ways to tweak this egg drop project for kindergartners, grade 1, grade 2, grade 3, grade 4, grade 5, and grade 6 students!

Whether you are a parent, teacher, or homeschooler – this classic experiment is a must try science project for kids of all ages!

Egg Drop Project

The idea with this egg drop science project is to have children try to think critically about why an egg might break when dropped and what you could do to protect the egg from breaking despite the impact of the landing. Some years we have made vehicles for the egg drop lined with kleenex, other times we have made simple parachutes to slow the fall, but this time we tried something completely different. You may have these things on hand; the beauty of this science project for kids is that you can use whatever household supplies you have on hand! Here are the few simple supplies we used in our egg drop experiment:

Paper Ice Cream Bowls
Rubber Bands
Sandwich Bags
Eggs

Egg Drop Ideas

Then I asked my daughter to find things in our house that may help keep the eggs safe inside the bowl. She was so much more creative than I had expected! Here are the different ideas she had that we tried:

Empty Bowl
Marshmallows – She filled the bowl half way with mini marshmallows, placed the egg on top, then filled the rest of the bowl with mini marshmallows.
Playdough – She covered the egg in playdough and placed it in the bowl.
Ooblek & Marshmallows – Ooblek is made with equal parts cornstarch and water. It is the substance that can be pounded with a hammer when hard but will also ooze through your fingers when you pick it up. After she poured some ooblek into the bowl, she placed the egg in. Then she topped with some more marshmallows.

Egg Drop Project Ideas

When the bowls were full and ready, I placed a sandwich bag over the top and secured it with a rubber band. We did this for all of the bowls. Next we voiced our hypothesis and then tried our experiment.

I thought for sure the playdough would work and thought that possibly the marshmallow & ooblek would work but I knew the empty bowl would not work. My daughter also knew that the empty bowl would not work. She thought that the marshmallow and playdough would work and really thought for sure that the ooblek and marshmallows would work.

She stood on a 6 foot ladder and I handed her one bowl at a time. She dropped them and we checked them all at the end.

The results are in…

Empty Bowl – We were right, the empty bowl did not work. The egg splattered all over the inside of the bowl and the bag top.
The playdough did not work.
The marshmallow idea did not work either. I was disappointed at this point. I wanted one of my daughters’ creations to work!
Then we opened the ooblek and marshmallow bowl. I think I literally screamed “WHAAT?”, in surprise. I was so excited for her. It worked. The egg sank down into the ooblek and the marshmallows helped soften the blow too. It was the perfect egg drop contraption!

Besides practicing creating a hypothesis and the scientific method, we also talked about how gravity made the bowls fall. The weight of the bowls and force of motion made the bowls smack to the ground, regardless of what was in them.

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