My 4th grade daughter was recently given the customary elementary school egg drop project. I was out of town for the week leading up to the event which meant I couldn’t help her with the design, so we took a separate but collaborative approach. She designed a solution on her own, and when I got back into town (the day before the event), I designed my own solution. The plan was to take the best ideas from each design and combine them into one.

The rules of the challenge were as follows:

• No parachutes, streamers, or balloons.
• No bubble wrap or Styrofoam.
• No food products (other than the egg, of course).
• Each project had to have an easily accessible door so the teacher could load the egg.
• The entire project couldn’t be more than 1.5 pounds (including the egg).

My daughter went with an empty peanut butter jar lined with foam squares:

I went with a plastic food container suspended by rubber bands inside of a 6″ x 6″ box:

Both seemed to be sound concepts, so we combined them into one:

It turns out the box we used wasn’t deep enough and the rubber bands weren’t quite secure so the egg broke when dropped off the roof of the school. So the next iteration used a 12″ x 12″ box, popsicle sticks to hold the rubber bands in place (on the outside of the box), and velcro to keep the lid closed:

Both her project and mine were thoroughly tested, and both were a success. We celebrated with a lunch of scrambled eggs: