Indoor activity
Egg Drop Challenge
Design and build a protective container from cardboard, straws, cotton wool, and tape, then drop a raw egg from a height and see if your engineering can keep it from cracking!
Materials
- Balloons optional
- Cardboard Boxes
- Cotton Wool
- Paper
- Raw Egg
- Straws
- Tape
Illustrated Steps
Plan Your Design
Sketch your protective container on paper before building. Decide how you will absorb the impact — padding, a crumple zone, or a slowing device like a balloon.
Build the Container
Construct an outer shell from cardboard and straws, holding joints together with tape. Make it sturdy but designed to absorb impact force.
Cushion the Egg
Wrap the egg in layers of cotton wool and pack more around it inside the container. The egg must not rattle. Seal the container shut with tape.
The Drop!
Drop your container from 2 metres and open it to check the egg. Study any cracks to improve your design, then try again from higher up!
What You’ll Create
Take on one of the most famous engineering challenges ever given to a school class — the egg drop! 🥚 Your mission is to build a protective container from simple household materials that will stop a raw egg from breaking when dropped from a height. There is no single right answer — the fun is in experimenting with different designs and figuring out why some work and some do not.
Have fun!
- 📐 Once you succeed at 2 m, challenge yourself with 3 m, 4 m, or off a balcony.
- ⚖️ Add a weight limit — your whole package must be under 200 g. Can you still protect the egg?
- 🧪 Try a bare egg with no protection first so you understand the problem.
- 🏆 Compete with a sibling or friend — whose design survives the highest drop?
Why It’s Amazing
- Engineering Design Process: Plan, build, test, analyse, iterate — this is the complete engineering cycle in a single afternoon. ⚙️
- Physics: Force, impulse, and energy absorption become real when a dropped egg either survives or splatters. 🔬
- Critical Thinking: Examining a cracked egg to understand where the design failed is genuine forensic analysis. 🧠
- Resilience: When the first design fails, children naturally want to rebuild and improve — exactly the mindset that produces engineers. 💪
Pro Tips
For ages 7–9: Provide a limited set of materials and let the child choose. Keep the drop height to 1–1.5 m and focus on the excitement of the test rather than the engineering analysis.
For ages 9–12: Add constraints — a material budget (each item has a point cost), a weight limit, or a size limit. Require a pre-drop prediction and a post-drop analysis in writing.
For ages 12+: Introduce the concept of impulse (force × time). Challenge the child to maximise the time over which the impact force acts rather than just adding more padding. Research real-world parallels: car crumple zones, sports helmets, airbags. 🚗