One of the advantages of having a 70 foot tower readily available is we can use it during our homeschool meetups. We recently used the tower to do an egg drop competition and it was so fun!
First things first, an egg drop competition is making something that the egg can be placed in so it won't break when it's dropped. You can use all different kinds of padding, wraps, boxes, tape, etc. to cushion the egg. You can even use a parachute or balloons to slow it down. Imagination is key! There are a lot of videos of how to do an egg drop on YouTube.
The kids were given about an hour to work with their partner to build something to put their egg in. There were all kinds of crazy looking contraptions in the end! Some chose to tape balloons to the outside, while others made sure a lot of padding was inside.
One of the homeschoolers even put his egg inside of a hollowed out eggplant! Then he cushioned it inside of a box.
The kids all had a blast working together to finish the project. To ensure that best friends didn't pick each other and leave someone else, we drew numbers out of a hat to find out who would be partnered up. It worked well - forcing some of the quieter kids to talk it out with their partner they may not know that well!
In the end, a few of the moms climbed the tower and started throwing them off, one by one! Each time the kids all cheered as they ran to the drop location to see if the egg was broken. It was pretty amazing that only 2 out of 13 broke!
Most of the ones with parachutes actually worked! They had enough time to open up and slow down the package. I think most of the packages had some type of parachute on them. I ended up getting a photo of each one of the drops and the kids loved seeing all of them falling!
It was the perfect day - no wind and no rain! It was funny, though, as some of them were falling, their parachute would leave them toward the tree. Only a few had to be shaken out of the branches, but they were guaranteed not to have broken. Ha!
This is definitely something we plan to do again, but next time we will have different parameters. For example, we may only give them 3-5 items to build their package with - like straws, a piece of tarp, and an egg carton. We figure more will break if we do something like that, but it will make things more interesting!
If you want to do an egg drop competition and you don't have a 70 foot tower handy (ha!), you can just find something tall to throw them off of - like a stadium, or even a second story of a building. It is really a fun activity and the kids learned a lot in the process, including how to work with other people!