Scholars Love Dropping Eggs!!!

An essential element of Saturday Academy is the interactivity of the lessons. We try to do primarily hands-on lessons, to keep the three hour Saturday Academy fun, engaging and to relabel academia as an arena where scholars can demonstrate their awesome intellect in a creative way. Two weeks ago, Berkeley Scholars 3, partook in the egg drop. This lesson is a favorite of the older cohorts. Maybe it's the act of dropping an egg, maybe its the unspoken competition or maybe its the physics lessons embedded in the activity; I'm not sure what makes the scholars LOVE this lesson, but Berkeley Scholars 3's affinity for this activity was no different.

The lesson is simple. We begin by discussing simple physic concepts such as:

Acceleration, gravitational pull, impact, force and absorption.

Scholars are amazed that an egg can't crack if force is concentrated evenly all around the shell (i.e. squeezing an egg with your hand) but will crack when tapped upon the edge of a bowl. The scholars engagement is captured and channeled into introduction questions, where as a group of learners we unearth the definition and examples of the above physic concepts. Then the challenge: Scholars must get in pairs and build a device that when dropped from 50 feet won't crack it's passenger (the egg). Pairs strategize, create a blueprint for their device, build then drop the device with the egg.

Check out some of our cool devices and the aftermath

Hector and Malayka's egg survived.

This egg wasn't so fortunate

Before the drop, Erick and Bryant's device is looking GOOD.

Their egg survived and these two ladies worked VERY well together all day.