To Rescue Eggs: A Design-Build-Test Experience for Children

The CDIO model involves conceiving, designing, implementing and operating a product or system as a context for engineering education. This has proved to be a successful teaching strategy for the students to gain deep, working knowledge of the fundamentals of engineering. In a societal context, this might however not be enough to fulfill the goal of producing higher quality graduated engineers, and an enough number of them to satisfy the needs of industry.In Sweden as well as in many other industrialized countries the present trend is that fewer students enroll in engineering education. One way to counteract that is to try to make younger children interested in engineering, or change their perception of what engineering is all about to start with, by introducing them to a design-build-test experience.”The egg-fall” has since 2003 been a yearly project at Chalmers University of Technology, directed towards 11 year old primary school children in the Göteborg region. 35 schools with approximately 800 pupils took part in the November 2006 competition. The challenge is for a group of at least three children to create a device with the help of which a raw egg can withstand a fall from a height of 15 m onto a concrete floor. There are no limitations on the kinds of materials or the designs that the teams are allowed to use, unless they are obviously harmful, dangerous or unsuitable for any other apparent reason. The designs are being judged with respect to three criteria: The technically best design, the most amusing design and the best submitted presentation of a design. The basic idea behind the challenge is not new; on the contrary, the task of building an egg-saving device is sometimes used as a teambuilding exercise for adults. The intention in the project described here is however to arouse an interest in engineering problems and reasoning already in primary schools, and to let the children have an early introductory contact with a university.The aim of the current paper is to present a well appreciated design-build experience, and to describe the impact that the project has had on the participants. Pupils and teachers were interviewed about their perception of technology and engineering, the competition, their interest in engineering as well as about their learning experiences. The pupils were also asked about their impression of the university as a possible career for them in the future, and questions to try to find out whether there are any noticeable systematic differences between girls and boys in their respective problem solving approaches.

Proceedings of the 3rd International CDIO Conference, MIT, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA, June 11-14, 2007