Kids’ Experiment Uses Eggs as Guinea Pigs

Middle school students discovered Tuesday that preventing an egg from cracking after a 20-foot drop onto a concrete surface is no easy feat.

With each team using 15 6-inch balsa wood sticks, 15 drinking straws, a piece of paper, string and tape, 28 students attempted to design and build a structure that would protect a raw egg, which was dropped from the second-story balcony of Cal State Northridge’s Business Administration and Economics Building.

The paper and string were used to form parachutes.

“This experiment teaches them about drag, resistance and impact,” said Gladys Sorensen, instructor of the Science Oympiad class offered by CSUN’s department of secondary education through its Summer Academic Enrichment Program.

The students were split up into seven design teams as a means of encouraging cooperation and teamwork, Sorenson said.

Of the seven teams, only two managed to keep their eggs intact.

The team consisting of Devin Rice and Javias Vezia, who will be in the seventh grade this fall, and sixth-graders Timothy Rogers and Alex Margolin succeeded with a diamond-shaped structure.

A triangular design worked out just fine for the team of eighth-graders Jonathan Milman, Daniel Peng and Mark Sirota and seventh-grader Sean Hazelwood.

Seventh-grader Kenji Yamakoshi, a member of a team whose egg broke, was philosophical about his experience in building structures.

“I look at the container as an airplane and the egg as people,” said Kenji, 12. “I learned that if you don’t design and make the container good, the egg just cracks. And if you don’t make the airplane good, the people die.”