Star-Journbal Editor
Young scientist and inventor "Alexander" Graham Pankratz was pensive as he watched the city worker in the electrical department bucket truck rise to a towering height above Hillsboro Elementary School. In a moment, he would learn if his cushioned contraption could protect its raw egg payload from breaking after falling 40 feet to the concrete playground.
Would his egg remain solid or wind up an omelet?
"I think it might break," Pankratz said. "But I don't know."
Egg-citement was sky-high as Pankratz, along with the other 46 fourth graders in Kelli Chisholm's science classes, put their creative packaging designs to the test in the classic exercise called the "egg drop experiment."
Students, parents, and even the school principal were outside in the open-air classroom this past Friday afternoon, in a highly-charged atmosphere that felt like a circus, a demolition derby, and a teenybopper rock concert all rolled into one hour of higher education, and family fun.
Hillsboro residents living a block or two away might've been wondering what in the world utility worker Todd Helmer was dropping from his bucket high above the treetops, and what on earth all the cheering and jeering was all about down below. If Chisholm's first science experiment of the year was an indication of things to come, the whole neighborhood had better watch out.
"Basically, we're learning the scientific method," she said. "You come up with a problem, and a hypothesis, then you create, or design an experiment, conduct it, take data on it, discuss the data, and then analyze."
Super-smart eggheads use the scientific method all the time at Cal Tech, MIT, and Stanford, but it's unlikely that any of them had more fun learning it than Chisholm's fourth graders.
Letters went home to parents explaining the rules and inviting them to help their children with the egg-drop experiment. The guidelines were simple: using any materials you can find, build a container that will protect a raw egg and keep it from breaking after a 40-foot fall. Many parents were on hand, digital cameras at the ready, to share the moment with their children, and see for themselves if the eggs tucked inside their collaborations would survive.
The youngsters screamed, "Higher! Higher!" as the bucket rose with their packages inside.
The first egg was packed in a plastic bowl of what appeared to be red and green Jell-O.
It splattered open on impact; red, green and yellow, egg-drop soup.
Helmer was into his role, shouting the student's name written on the package, then pausing long enough for the students to break into a name-shouting chant, before dropping it.
"Emily! Emily! Emily!" they yelled, as Emily Seachrist's package fell.
To protect her egg, Seachrist had surrounded it with five inflated balloons, and wrapped it around and around with packaging foam. The crowd went quiet after it hit. Chisholm opened the package, and found a runny yolk.
"It's broken," she said, as everyone groaned.
But Seachrist was in good spirits.
When asked if she'd forgotten to hard-boil the egg, she smiled.
"We couldn't do that," she said. "But I wish we could have."
Moments later, Chisholm opened Allison Weber's package, peeling away packing material from her mother's Pampered Chef boxes.
"We have an egg!" Chisholm shouted excitedly, as if she'd just discovered the first one ever laid.
The youngsters jumped and hollered, rock-concert crazy, and ear-splitting loud.
About half of the eggs survived. But despite a remarkable effort, Darcy Heinrich's did not.
Her plastic Tidy Cat's cat litter box hit the ground with amazing force and blew apart like a plastic car caught in a demolition derby; parts flying everywhere.
"We started with babushka dolls, but they were really babushka dogs," Heinrichs explained. "We packed them in cotton balls, and paper bags, and then a Velcro container. Then we used more paper bags, and a Tupperware container, and then more paper bags, and put the whole thing in the litter container."
"I'm not really disappointed," she added. "It was just pretty fun."
Some students seemed enmeshed with their eggs in a mother-hen kind of way.
Shelly Arnold and classmates Lakyn Johnson, and Hannah Bartel worked together to put Bobby the Egg in a basket. They held hands as he plummeted to the ground. When Chisholm shouted, "We have an egg!" they shrieked and jumped around, overjoyed that he was unharmed. And now, it seems, Bobby is college-bound.
"We're not going to eat him!" Arnold said, taking mock offense at the question.
"We're going to send him away to college!"
The most successful packages were attached to homemade parachutes that carried the eggs to softer landings. Other survivors were cocooned in bubble wrap, and Styrofoam peanuts. Good concepts, all around.
When Cody Craney brought his letter home from school, his mother Jessica told him to talk to the mechanically-minded member of the family, his father, Vince. Together, they made a basic blue bandanna parachute, strung with fishing line. They wrapped the egg in bubble wrap. When the time came, it touched down safe and sound.
"It was excellent," Jessica said, of the family homework project. "It was so exciting for Vince to actually help work on a project and see it all the way through."
And then there was the package put together by Emily Jost, who lives on a farm.
She hid her egg in a handful of straw from the barnyard, and wrapped in a clear plastic bag.
It survived the drop, proving perhaps that the chickens came first, before the eggs.
"I kind of thought it would work," Jost said.
Perhaps the most innovative package was Kennedy Lucero's sock hammock.
She put her egg in a blue sock and strung it, like a hammock, inside two walls of a shoe box.
It bounced on impact, but the egg didn't break, which was as a big relief for Kennedy.
She, too, had named her egg — meet Fred.
As in Fred the fried egg? The boiled egg? The scrambled egg?
"No, I'm going to keep him forever," she said.
"Oh, no you're not!" her mother, Trina, said.
Just before the final bell rang, Pankratz's contraption dropped, like a UFO, from the sky.t looked like a golf umbrella, duct-taped to a box, then fastened to a tripod, or something.
But it wasn't an umbrella. It was a tent cover, which caught a pocket of air at the last possible moment before hitting the ground. It took Chisholm longer to extricate this one.
"We have an egg!" she shouted.
And Pankratz punched the sky.
