In the Name of Science: Fly Those Eggs, Don't Dye Them

Megan Gambale bought seven dozen eggs Thursday morning and brought them to work. With Easter this coming Sunday, six dozen were hard-boiled so members of the could dye them.

Another fate awaited about half a dozen eggs. During school vacation week, they became the focus of a science experiment.

Nineteen club members, 12 girls and seven boys, working in teams of two or three, spent an hour designing, building and finally testing contraptions that would keep a dropped uncooked egg unbroken. Their materials:  cardboard paper towel rolls, bags, ribbon, string, straws, rubber bands, paper and duct tape.

Create a safe vessel for an unhardened egg, Gambale, the club’s education and leadership development director, instructed the youths.

“You do not want the egg to break” when it is dropped.

“Work together,” Gambale said. “Be polite” and respectful of others’ ideas.

Sketch your design first so you don’t waste supplies, especially with Earth Day Friday.

All designs were similar in their overall concept:  a paper cup stuffed with paper to pad the egg, attached to a parachute-like bag to slow its fall.

Variety came in the details. Some connected the two parts with string or ribbon or straws.

Teresa James, Jessica Skinner and Adam Canario, all of Woburn, worked together. Teresa and Jessica are both 8 and attend the . Adam, 9, attends the .

Jessica sketched a design. Adam, who has done an egg drop before, suggested some changes.

Teresa said she “loves to do science. You get to learn a lot,” she said, about how things are made.

“Science is full of clues,” said Jessica. “You need patience to figure things out.”

“Like a jigsaw puzzle,” Adam said.

In another group, sisters Rebecca and Rachael Donahue and their group used two parachutes to counter a variable:  Thursday’s stiff gusts of wind.

Rebecca, 12, a student at the , has done the egg drop experiment at the club and at the Museum of Science. Each experience was different because of variables like construction materials and weather, Rebecca said. She has not had to contend, she said, with wind.

Rachael, 10, a student at the , said they had tested the way a previous day’s project, a paper towel-and-tissue paper tree, fell—“gently.”  But tissue paper was not on the list of supplies for the egg project.

They named their egg protector “The Egginator.”

While they worked, the youths engaged in what Gambale termed “secret learning.”

“We talked about the scientific method,” she said, but not explicitly, so when the students come across it in school, “they’re familiar with it.” A licensed elementary level teacher, Gambale runs another club program, Mad Science, which is more explicitly about the scientific method, she said.

After about 40 minutes of design and construction, students went outside to test their egg protectors.

Julie Gage, the club’s director of program development, the official egg dropper, climbed a ladder to the roof above the building’s back door. Wind gusts were so strong that Ryan Thomas, the club’s youth leadership coordinator, was enlisted to hold the ladder.

Gambale set a carton of uncooked eggs on the ground. One at a time, a member of each group came forward, loaded their device with a raw egg and handed it to Gambale, who handed it off to Gage.

“Five. Four. Three. Two. One,” the students counted down. Gage handed each device to gravity.

Splat. The first egg crashed and splattered on the ground.

“Disgusting,” said Rebecca Donahue a few minutes later as their “Egginator” fell and scrambled its egg.

The only egg that survived unbroken had a paper bag parachute.

But that wasn’t the end of the experiment for all of the students.

As she walked into the club, Rebecca Donahue, who said she thinks “science is fun,” was already thinking about ways she might improve her device’s performance. Maybe a taller egg holder, she hypothesized.

“I might want to do this at home,” she said.