Today was eggcellent. Yes. Prepare yourself for more egg puns. Students participated in the great Egg-gineering Challenge. I came across a tweet last school year from @carenmac and this project, now in our second year, got started. Caren hatched a brilliant idea and I’m grateful that Twitter brought us, and our learners, together.
The Task: Students are given a specific set of simple materials. 15 straws, one sheet of paper, 5 rubber bands, 1 30-cm piece of tape, 100 cm of string. In a shoebox, they design a shipping container for an egg (sealed inside a plastic baggie for safety). It’s teamwork at it’s best. Collaboration, compromise, and hard work. The box is then shipped to another location in an eggs-change. When both classes receive their packegges, they open them live on Skype.
The Learning: This project is so much more than just building a shipping container. Here are just a few of the many ideas of how it can be involved in a full, authentic, interdisciplinary learning experience.
Social Studies: Geography. The boxes are going from one location to another. You could even egg-spand the project and ship to multiple locations. Map reading. Finding distance on a map. Travel routes of the US Mail. Learning about another place by decorating the boxes to represent your state. Using Google Earth as a learning tool.
Science: Using simple materials in new ways. Calculating the amount of weight or pressure and egg can withstand. Measurement as a scientific observation tool. Charting and graphing results. Cause and effect. Egg-speriment reflection.
Math: Measurement of materials. Price the materials for build and ask students to calculate a building budget. Use that budget to determine the cost versus success rate of the final shipping results. Graph the costs of building. Developing charts in Excel or CreateAGraph.com. Predict success rates (fractions and percents). Calculate success rates. Create a chart to display results of shipping. Determine distance traveled, send to multiple locations, and calculate if distance traveled effects success rate.
English Language Arts: : Communication through Skype. Public speaking. Letter writing to include with the egg. Persuasive writing: ”Why do you think your design will be successful?” Descriptive writing: “Describe how you built your egg box.” Summarizing results: Summarize your results. Explain what you might do differently in a rebuild. Compare and contrast your location with the partner classes location. Extend the project into learning about another state.
Beyond the Subjects: Collaboration. Risk. Struggle. Compromise. When a box is opened and there’s a success, you’ll see it. I captured one blurry photo of that moment. The kids were in motion, eggcitedly jumping around. To the kids whose eggs fared less? It was about risk-taking and results and a great lesson.
*NOTE: We also took eggstreme precautions with the safety of the containers. Each egg was sealed in a ziploc bag, the boxes were lined with a single layer of paper towels, and each package was wrapped tightly in saran wrap. These measures are not to protect the egg, but to tightly seal the contents.